How long do you think we would last?
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- HubertManne@piefed.socialEnglish2 hours
So. Its sorta impossible for this to happen and still have computers. The internet is mostly just logic systems on computers the transmission media can be kinda anything. Since databases have the records things might be slower but everything would still be there.
7 hoursDepends what causes it.
Nasty worm, no biggie, people will be confident it can be fixed quickly.
Carrington Event (think worldwide EMP), instant collapse, planes falling out of the sky, computers fried, cars since 1990 (guess) dead, hospitals destroyed and on and on.
- 5 hours
Yeah, even a coordinated attack on physical networking backbones wouldn’t be TOO rough. We’d have to piece together what’s left and figure out what to replace, but there’s enough worldwide structure that we can do that in a pretty coordinated manner even without the Internet - it would probably just take a lot longer. I feel that a lot of the West would be the worst off, but surprisingly, a lot of governments already have plans for stuff like this. I feel even with incompetence, you’d be looking at 2-3 years max, but I don’t think you’d see Purge-style societal collapse or whatever you’re envisioning.
- slazer2au@lemmy.worldEnglish10 hours
Immediate? no. Rapid, yes.
We have had mass communication since before the internet and those technologies still exist outside the internet. (TV, phones, radio)
The internet is not as fragile as people think, small pockets of internet will come back online independently of each other and will eventually become interconnected again. Maybe a month to get a country up and going and then a couple more months to get continents connected again.
- 7 hours
I wonder how many would know how to get a radio if it came to it. “Okay, I just need to get a radio from Amazon… Shiiiiit”
- slazer2au@lemmy.worldEnglish7 hours
Pretty much all cars come with radios… If not there are many shops that play the radio as in store music.
I’ve actually gone back to listening to the radio. The music is shit, but I don’t have to think about it, and the hosts chatter is surprisingly comforting. Great background noise for working or chores
- 3 hours
I stopped listening to the radio cause it’s more ads than music or chatter
- 10 hours
I see an immediate collapse followed by a quick recovery, personally. If the Internet goes down, a lot of other shit goes down too…until we get the old telegraph lines running again.
IPoAC
It sometimes can be a better option to move data, since storage density is pretty high. Like if Cletus needed a shitload of mp4s and only had POTS or pigeons lol
- 8 hours
No online pr0n? It would mean the end of the world as we know it. 😱
- thesohoriots@lemmy.worldEnglish6 hours
I have a friend with a meticulously curated collection (with its own Byzantine sorting system) on a massive hard drive he calls “the vault” because of this.
- 6 hours
And here I thought I was bad for having a puny little LUKS encrypted USB stick laying around with “stuff” on it 🤣
- 9 hours
Just internet? No. The world existed for a while before the Internet and many of the people who lived during that time are still alive and would know how to get by without entertainment. Of terrestrial television and radio are still functioning then the world will not lose much and continue on how it did 30 years ago.
Just because many people can’t imagine a world with the Internet doesn’t mean that it is critical to life.
- 7 hours
☝️ this.
Please, if any of you honestly are entertaining the idea that the internet is necessary for society, I urge you to go outside and get some non-digital hobbies and/or meet some people offline.
It’s good for you.
- 9 hours
Define what you mean by “blackout.”
It’s a network of networks. If every connected device suddenly went offline, yeah, there’d be turmoil and a lot of deaths before things stabilized.
But if you really mean “all the backbone cables went offline” or “all the ISPs shut down” or “all the CDNs crashed” or “the top 20 services vanished” then the answers would be different.
The internet can technically run over carrier pigeon, after all. And some countries have already had “no Internet” days without collapsing.
- 8 hours
If you’re worried about that, you should check out a Meshtastic node. Even if infrastructure fails, that network will remain online as long as there’s people using them within range and functioning GPS satellites in the sky.
Since everyone that uses one helps transport encrypted or unencrypted traffic, there is no single point of failure.
- 9 hours
It depends how long it lasts. A day, two days, forever?
We can probably deal with a day, but it would be very very expensive and take a while to clean up.
Permanent? That would be extremely bad. Entire industries would collapse, with unemployment skyrocketing. Financial losses of unprecedented scale. I don’t even know where to start.
Medical systems would collapse and some people would die because if that.
- 2 hours
Yep. A lot of things would go sideways in healthcare if the Internet was down for an extended period of time. Yes, there are paper-based backup processes and so on, but they can only hold for so long. I don’t think people realize how much stuff is already in the cloud that we all depend on.
- 9 hours
No, but I’m working from home so would need to go to the office… as a software developer it would hit hard!
- 9 hours
A financial collapse almost certainly and business would struggle until they find alternatives, especially the service sector. But manufacturing, construction and agriculture is not as dependent on internet for day to day operations.
Social I think it would probably be a boom and when internet get back online a lot of people might look back at the blackout as a refreshing experience.
At least that’s my take.
