Are we talking about some kind of societal collapse , or just an Internet collapse ? Hard to imagine some kind of event that would only affect the Internet .

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How will you live w/o inter net access ?

Will do.

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Originally posted by selogic:
Are we talking about some kind of societal collapse, or just an Internet collapse ? Hard to imagine some kind of event that would only affect the Internet.

It has been posited that an absolute collapse of the Internet may well trigger a societal collapse.

It's not as far-fetched as some may think. The Internet isn't just all about the WWW and email. As noted by other posters: A lot of people and businesses now rely upon it to conduct their daily activities. Plus, with the slow demise of the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network, aka: the phone system), the Internet has become key to corporate and private communications.

Many corporations operate "their own" private WANs (Wide Area Networks) to connect their various locations to one another, but the transport for those WANs almost inevitably use the same hardware as the Internet.

The cellular network uses the same networking hardware and backbone.

In short: If the Internet went down entirely: Being able to access SIGforum or your bank account would be the least of your worries.

How will I restock my ammo supply? I order almost all of it online now.

I just ordered several boxes of 270 Win.

I'd save a buttload of money with no internet.

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Originally posted by ensigmatic:
In short: If the Internet went down entirely: Being able to access SIGforum or your bank account would be the least of your worries.

100% agree with that. One Hundred Percent. Almost everything you do depends on internet. Keeping cash on hand? It would help in the short term. Maybe a month into an internet outage (OUTAGE) nobody will take cash. How much is it worth? Do you take it to the bank and they write it down in their ledger? Ugghhh. This forum has great advice, keep your rifle clean, how's your ammo doing, how's your food supply doing. That's why I hang here.

Probably go back to keeping old magazines on the back of the toilet.

Even with internet, internet access was a sketchy hit or miss thing via phone line where I live. Now that wifi has arrived I find that that I spend a lot of time (more time than I should) on the internet. So, I suspect I would miss it for a while, but I don't think it would affect how I live to any degree unless the loss of internet is a result of the break down of society as a whole.

If I didn’t have or couldn’t have the internet, it would be an adjustment period but I don’t think I would perish.

I guess I'll be done working as I am in a remote position.

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100% agree with that. One Hundred Percent. Almost everything you do depends on internet.

Most have no idea that once the internet goes down so does just about every aspect of society. The majority of everything you do every day relies on the internet.

I don't think countries like China would send troops over to take us out. They wouldn't have to. Just flip that switch.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: a1abdj,

 
An immediate result will be rioting by EBT/SNAP recipients unable to get their free shit.

Personally, I’d miss SIGforum and my invisible friends. I’d have more time and spend less money. Paying bills would be different. Not a lot of other direct impacts, but it isn’t hard to imagine that there might be a lot of other negative societal impacts which might well end up turning into negative personal impacts.

Maybe the post office would make a comeback.

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Originally posted by 229DAK:
Maybe the post office would make a comeback.

The post office cannot even put packages on my front porch like they claim (missing yet ANOTHER package they claim they delivered!), so no... they don't need to make a comeback!

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Originally posted by ensigmatic:


It's not as far-fetched as some may think. The Internet isn't just all about the WWW and email. As noted by other posters: A lot of people and businesses now rely upon it to conduct their daily activities. Plus, with the slow demise of the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network, aka: the phone system), the Internet has become key to corporate and private communications.

A lot of dependence on the Internet (if not all) is because the advancement of technology.
When I was IT training in the mid/late 90's, we only had modem access speeds.
In fact, my training class the IT department of the Boeing office here and myself were the only only ones with an ISDN line which was about twice as fast as the 56K modem, even the school was on std modem.
So there was not much you could effectively do back then except to mindlessly wait for a web page to load or get emails, maybe cruise a BBS board or two (predecessor to websites of sorts).
YES ... it is a key component now days for sure.

No internet... I will probably start to live a slightly productive life again.

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Originally posted by smschulz:
A lot of dependence on the Internet (if not all) is because the advancement of technology.
When I was IT training in the mid/late 90's, we only had modem access speeds.
In fact, my training class the IT department of the Boeing office here and myself were the only only ones with an ISDN line which was about twice as fast as the 56K modem, even the school was on std modem.
So there was not much you could effectively do back then except to mindlessly wait for a web page to load or get emails, maybe cruise a BBS board or two (predecessor to websites of sorts).
YES ... it is a key component now days for sure.

I don’t recall ever having a modem any faster than 19.2Kb, but I did get a lot of work done over one of the first ISDN (The joke was that ISDN stands for I Smell Dollars Now) lines in Mountain View beta testing one of our company products. Initially it was only 64Kb, but it was pretty darned solid which was a huge upgrade over dialup. Once both channels were available it was 128 Kb available, but it made very little difference over the single channel 64. I was writing code and while I was using an NCD X terminal, there wasn’t a tremendous amount of data flowing over the connection. Back then emails were plain text. Heck, I used rmail in an emacs window. Now it seems like emails rarely get sent without gigabytes of images attached. As the bandwidth has expanded the data has expanded to use it. Same as the compute cycles and memory, as the computers have gotten more powerful the operating systems and applications have gotten fatter and slower. It would be interesting (but likely not pretty) to see what happened if it all went away, or even radically slowed down.

I guess I’ll have to switch up to the highlight reel.

When I retire, I'll find out.
Radio and maybe TV in my future.
Keep the phone on, but only for calls.