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

(And now with more Pants!)

[Anonymous Coward]

If it gets Idle off /., it wouldn't be a complete loss.

Re:(And now with more Pants!)

[sopssa]

Sad thing is that this story *is not* in idle, but entertainment.

Uhm... wrong site.

[nametaken]

What is this, digg? Cracked joke pages don't belong here.

Re:Uhm... wrong site.

[wizardforce]

Idle and Slashdot 2.0 don't belong on Slashdot either. Unfortunately, someone behind the scenes thought that the best way to lure new users was to emulate Digg instead of doing what Slashdot did best; allow nerds and geeks to discuss interesting articles and thus provide intellectual entertainment. I think that they'll find that the whole charm of Slashdot was the discussion after the article and it is what made Slashdot worth returning to on a daily basis.

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.

[altek]

+1000

I have been on /. since it launched (yeah, back then we nerds were quite resistant to ever creating logins for sites, hence my non-low account ID). And it seems in the last 6 months or so it's been going this way - I have gone to reading it in Google Reader and also have Gizmodo and Engadget in there as well. It seems like at least a third of the posts lately are just regurgitated from Giz and Engadget, a day or so later.

My thought is that the internet has grown so huge, that /. can't compete with sites that have pageviews hundreds of times higher, and this is their way of sucking in some extra pageviews.

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.

Part of it may just be that the tech world as a whole has transformed from what it was in the mid-nineties. Back then, everything was awe-inspiring and amazing in the tech world, and now it's all pretty pedestrian, we've become quite jaded.

And, our attention spans have gotten so short, that spending a half hour reading an article about a distributed network cracking the latest encryption algorithm gets pushed under the three posts about new cell phones. And a simple yet brilliant idea is no longer brilliant, it's just expected from middle management in the outsourced development sweatshops.

Re:Uhm... wrong site.

[Brian Gordon]

I have been on /. since it launched (yeah, back then we nerds were quite resistant to ever creating logins for sites, hence my non-low account ID).

Uhhh yeah me too

Re:Uhm... wrong site.

[Anonymous Coward]

While much of you may lament the current days of slashdot, when I started visiting it ~4-6 years ago it was filled with memes (I havn't seen a soviet russia joke in quite some time), first post jokes (GNAA) and dupes. Now it seems like most days most of the memes have rightfully left for reddit/digg. So while the comments have gotten better, the articles have probably gotten worse. What slashdot needs to do is evaluate the story submission process and the mods currently in control to emphasize less bullshit and more tech.

Re:Uhm... wrong site.

[JustOK]

What slashdot needs to do is evaluate the story submission process and the mods currently in control to emphasize less bullshit and more tech.

What slashdot needs is a beowulf cluster of hot grits poured over Natalie Portman

Re:Uhm... wrong site.

[ZipprHead]

Being a long time reader myself, I'll have to say /. does have some strong competition of late with Engadget scooping stories first and BoingBoings editorial staff. But what makes this site awesome, is the commenting, moderation and user community. To this day, I often get what I need to know from the article and summaries. Engadget and other sites can not hold a candle to this community.

Kudos to us all!

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.

twentytwelve

[Shadow Wrought]

Isn't this what the Mayan's prophisied for 2012?

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.

[eln]

True, life was just fine before the Internet. Now, though, the Internet has infiltrated almost every aspect of our daily lives. Given that, if the Internet were to be shut off permanently, we would have to do without a lot of conveniences we've become accustomed to, which would make it a lot more painful than life before the Internet was. To throw in the requisite car analogy, life without cars probably wasn't all that horrible (at least, not due to the lack of cars specifically). However, now that cars are a major part of the fabric of our everyday lives, it would be substantially more painful to give them up completely now.

Add to all this the fact that a large percentage of us would have to find something else to do for a living, and many of us would have to emerge from the basements we've been in since 1987, and you have a real problem.

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.

[warGod3]

Which side of the fence?

I was in Cuba (Gitmo) in the 80s. We went to the beach, we played D&D, we skated, we did all kinds of things. You read a lot. Hell, we didn't even have cable or a McDonalds until 1986 or so. You really have to make do with what you have.

It's amazing what you learn to live with and what you find to entertain yourself with.

Re:It's not so bad.

[Ralph Spoilsport]

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

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.

Work?

[Ogive17]

I'd probably get some work done... though I'm not sure how since our data is stored in Colorado and I'm in Ohio.

Re:OMG

[sopssa]

But we'd have no more lost carrier jokes, so it might balance out.

You would think so. Whole world would be filled with nerds running all around yelling LOST CARRIER, LOST CARRIER!!

new poll

[tloh]

What would replace the internet?

a)sneaker net
b)ip over avian carriers
c)johnny mnemonic
d)radio killed the itunes store
e)cowboy neal
f)breasts (the live nude version on a real female)

Re:Riots? You've got to be kidding.

[Nebulious]

This may clarify a few things: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humour

Re:South Park had this covered

[skine]

I think that if you actually look into it, you'll find that The Simpsons covered all of the topics even before South Park did.

There is no point in this.

[Hurricane78]

Because it would never happen.

Why I'm so sure? Because there is no "they" in the Internet. Everybody can connect to his neighbors' wifi router, if needed. And the moment when no company on the planet is interested in using the now unused wires and cell phone towers, to sell services to customers, is the moment when humanity itself ceases to exist.

I don't see a point in imagining not having the Internet. And I know how it would look anyway, since I already lived when there was no such thing. I even know how life in a monastery without electricity is. Or in a hut in the middle of nowhere.

Now, that we know of the concept of a Internet, as long as there is a critical mass of humans exists, there will be such a network. :)

Re:Oblig. South Park Quote

[Hurricane78]

That was the best quote you could manage? You missed out on the epic chance to quote

"We can't go back to Playboy now!"

What would happen if Microsoft turned it off

[Animats]

All it would take is one really bad Windows Update to turn off 70% of the Internet.

Question for Homeland Security: who has access to the master signing key for Windows Update? Who does the background check on those people?

Re:What would happen if Microsoft turned it off

[John Hasler]

> All it would take is one really bad Windows Update to turn off 70% of the
> Internet.

Yes but we're discussing the part that would actually be missed.

Re:Slashdot

[PFI_Optix]

Right up until someone decides that "misbehaving" includes "submitting content of which we do not approve." The last thing we need is for the internet to give some powermonger the tools to easily silence dissent.