What If They Turned Off the Internet?

theodp writes "It's the not-too-distant future. They've turned off the Internet. After the riots have settled down and the withdrawal symptoms have faded, how would you cope? Cracked.com asked readers to Photoshop what life would be like in an Internet-addicted society learning to cope without it. Better hope it never happens, or be prepared for dry-erase message boards, carrier pigeon-powered Twitter, block-long lines to get into adult video shops, door-to-door Rickrolling, Lolcats on Broadway, and $199.99 CDs."

Comments

It's not so bad.

[Ralph Spoilsport]

I remember an age before the internet. It was harder to find information and other data, but it wasn't so bad. The things you did have access to you took a bit more seriously. I spent more time at the library then. And I had an extensive cassette tape collection... No Internet != no computers, so rather than DL music, I suspect I would spend more time at LAN parties, which are always fun.

Re:It's not so bad.

[Ralph Spoilsport]

Yeah - the transition would suck.

In counterpoint, a friend of mine survived the "special times" in Cuba (basically, a massive powerdown) and said that the first six months pretty much sucked ass. But then you started to smile again, because the water was still warm and inviting, and you still had your friends, and you began to have fun. Only no one drove cars, and you invented things to do that didn't require money, electricity, or petroleum. A year after - you're fine. Different and less comfortable, but fine.

RS

Re:It's not so bad.

[Ralph Spoilsport]

She was in Havana. Was able to escape in the late 90s.

South Park had this covered

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.southparkstudios.com/episodes/166179/

They covered basically every topic in there

BBS

[lothos]

we'd be using our 1200bps modems connecting to the local BBS and swapping email over fido.

Re:BBS

[causality]

"we'd be using our 1200bps modems connecting to the local BBS and swapping email over fido."

exactly what I did in the old days. As long as computers are around, people will find a way to connect them and connect themselves to each other using them. I suspect that while dial up might not be answer people run to these days I could see people setting up wireless networks within their own neighborhoods, and extending them into WANs that cover a good part of their city.

This has already been worked out. It has a tremendous advantage, too: it would be more difficult for a company or government to either shut it down or personally identify individual users.

What I would do?

[MindlessAutomata]

Let's face it, by then the shit will have hit the fan. Mankind will have been put under its own boot, with either one of two situations occuring: Men ruled by man or man ruled by men. Neither world is acceptable to me, not like this one is a model existence either.

I'd put on my headband, boots, camo pants, and grab whatever black market guns I could find (by then guns will be outlawed so we can become more in-line with the more "progressive" nations) and maybe grenade or two. I'd light a cigarette to go with my 5 o'clock shadow, strap on a bullet belt, and teach any of the dogs responsible for this mess, including those that tried to stop me, what the inside of hell looks like, all while Foetus's Anything (Viva!) played in the background. Rule of law? I'll show you Newton's first law: my bullet will hit their heads which will cause their brains to spray out.

There's no coping in my world. Only the blood of those responsible for this mess. Everywhere.

Re:What I would do?

[tftp]

You must have a lot of squirrels in your area.

Millions, actually. Hunting doesn't even make a dent in their population, and they cause a lot of damage to farmers and ranchers. I'm talking about ground squirrels, not about tree squirrels - the latter are game species. I had more than a hundred ground squirrels last summer near my house alone, running everywhere like rats, eating my plums right off the tree, and such. Don't know how many will be there next March. I had to work on their numbers because their burrows are eroding the hillside, and because I like plums very much :-) In 2010 I expect to use those 17HMR, and a good deal of high velocity 22LR, in Modoc County starting in March, and later, during whole summer, in Central Valley (Carrizo Plain.)

I mis-remember it

[Jay L]

I'm always struck by my pre-Internet memories, because I have no recollection of how I learned timely, geek-related facts. I was a huge Trek fan in high school, and I knew all about conventions and movie plans and whatnot. I'm sure I got some of it from BBS's, and I must have subscribed to some 'zines, but how did I ever find those without - not just without the Internet, but without ubiquitous search?

Re:I mis-remember it

[Culture20]

I was a huge Trek fan in high school, and I knew all about conventions and movie plans and whatnot.[...] but how did I ever find those without - not just without the Internet, but without ubiquitous search?

Word of mouth amongst friends. Local game/comicbook shop poster boards.

Re:Uhm... wrong site.

[rah1420]

I think the old saw that "Nature abhors a vacuum" would take effect. It wouldn't take long to rebuild a network of networks again. The protocols that are used and the speed and whatnot may be still at issue, but having had an internet and knowing its potentiality, I think that if it were taken down, something would have to be invented to replace it.

Now, if it were 'taken down' because "they" wanted to silence it, I recommend to you the quote famously attributed to John Gilmore: "The internet interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it."

I don't know if you'd ever get it taken down for non-technical reasons (like The End Of Life As We Know It.)

Re:Uhm... wrong site.

[MichaelSmith]

The content on here has definitely changed. I still find some engaging comment threads, but it just seems like the truly geeky content has gotten watered down with posts about new products, jokes, etc.

Exactly. And since both nature and my cat abhor vacuums, where the hell are the good geek new sites now?

I used to enjoy Technocrat. I wish Bruce had shown an interest in letting the community move off his server.

Re:Uhm... wrong site.

[mikael]

Back then, everything was awe-inspiring and amazing in the tech world

That era was when Nvida/3dfx were first founded - the first texture mapping graphics cards came out, then full transformation and lighting in hardware, Quake, then wide screen resolutions. 450 MHz Pentium III processors seemed super-zippy fast. Microsoft introduced 'sockets' to Windows and announced that Windows NT had made UNIX legacy. SGI wanted to prove that a software based OpenGL would be as fast as custom game rendering code. ADSL broadband was becoming available in some apartments. Previously low-key student houses who just happened to have broadband connections found themselves the most popular destinations for new students. The battle between Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator had begun. Cell phones still had a long antennae coming out the top.

Just before in 1994, having a 56K modem was a major advancement, Windows 3.1 was still the main development target. Reading USENET, text based discussion boards and subscribing to mailing lists was the main method of getting news. Viewing images would require using ftp manually or using uuencode/decode to get a server to fetch a 640x480 image, encode it as ASCII, slice the file up and send it to you in chunks, which you could then reassemble manually.

Now, if your cable provider goes from 50 Mbits to 70 Mbits, that isn't noticable, though laptop screen have shrunk a bit, and everyone uses LCD monitors now. Just about every mobile phone seems to look like a touchpad PDA or has a little keyboard and allows the user to play movies and music. MP3 players are the size of credit cards. USB Keychains now store more information than a DVD let alone a 1996 hard disk drive. What could just about be done on supercomputer in 1996, can now be done on a graphics card.