Comment by Jupe

Comment by Jupe 11 days ago

24 replies

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Apologies, but this strikes me as a rather silly question. What I would keep in the event of a prolonged network outage would be of minimal significance.

What I'd really be concerned about would be our modern society. Purchasing food, water, fuel, clothes and other necessities would be near impossible. Supply chains would not just have problems, but literally fall apart. Money would stop moving.

If anything is "too big to fail" it would be the internet.

bruce511 11 days ago

You're not wrong. If the internet fails for everyone (at least at the city level) then basically there's no banking.

Along with no banking there's no way to order supplies. No way to accept delivery. The very least of your problems is music or Wikipedia.

And I know you're thinking cash will help you, but its not enough. We used to have forests of paper and squadrons of clerks- that simply doesn't exist anymore.

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  • imoverclocked 11 days ago

    I think that there is a lot of merit to your argument. However, I think there is also the human factor as well as a malleable technology factor. I'll speak to the second factor.

    While we don't have forests of paper, we have pocket-sized computers that can talk peer to peer and store practically infinite amounts of transactions.

    We don't have squadrons of clerks but we have software that can collate transactions locally.

    The internet is certainly a useful tool for quick connectivity but there are definitely ways to do things without the internet and without reverting all the way back to cash/check and paper ledgers.

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    • jpc0 11 days ago

      Food for thought that the parent didn't mention.

      You will be unable to communicate except through face to face meetings. There is no more POTS(plain old telephone system), the entire world routes phone calls over the internet. There's no IM, the physical mail system will at least become dramatically backlogged if not fail entirely due to infrastructure failure internally and the new increased demand.

      In my country is it not just that there isn't a POTS system, there isn't even copper. You have a FTTH(fiber to the home) link or a mobile connection. To my knowledge even in the US fiber terminates at the distribution point and your cable supply is last mile only.

      I don't know what even will cause a global internet outage at the scale but it will be global panic.

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      • imoverclocked 9 days ago

        > I don't know what even will cause a global internet outage at the scale but it will be global panic.

        A coordinated attack on key infrastructure (eg: root DNS servers) could do it. Much of the internet is held together with duct tape and bubble gum. The reason it stays alive is because there are a lot of duct tape and bubble gum specialists :)

        There are still a lot of ways to communicate without the internet over large distances (eg: radio, satellite, plane, drone, etc...) and there are different considerations/requirements for them. They are still an ultimate backup to the world we have created but shopping on Amazon via ham-radio would be quite painful!

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    • lxgr 10 days ago

      The problem wouldn’t be a lack of alternative means to facilitate transactions, it would be a lack of trusted counterparties to transact with.

      Grocery stores and bars used to let local trusted customers pay their accumulated purchases once per week or month, or accept personal checks from them without any means of verifying whether they were covered.

      Today? It’s essentially cash or credit card, and no more mechanisms for local/decentralized credit decisions whatsoever, even if a checkout clerk might personally know a customer.

      Because of ubiquitous connectivity, we have greatly increased, but also centralized trust. Local trust isn’t restored quickly, especially during an emergency when tensions are high anyway.

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      • imoverclocked 10 days ago

        There are digital forms of currency already but barring that, you can still manage centralized trust with distributed communication.

        Ie: maybe I trust a mechanism by Google/Apple where tap becomes powered locally and the phone/device itself carries a balance.

        It’s true that these solutions don’t exist today but they are not far away with the amount of pressure we are talking about by losing the internet.

        Also, credit cards used to work in a similar way to checks. The information would be recorded and the transaction would be finalized later.

        I came across a pre-magnetic-strip credit card years ago… it’s pretty fascinating how currency has evolved in the last half-century. There is no reason for me to think that it will stop where we are at today.

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      • GTP 10 days ago

        While I see the issue with credit cards, why wouldn't cash work? I see the two following possible issues:

        1. ATM machines may stop working.

        2. Your local bank branch may have issues knowing how much money you have on your account, making it hard to manually give you cash.

        Both can be great issues, but can be worked around with a bit of time to prepare. Do you see other issues?

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        • lxgr 10 days ago

          Cash would work, but depending on who/where you ask, many people don't even have enough cash on them (or at home) to get them through a single day.

          > but can be worked around with a bit of time to prepare

          The prompt was "the Internet goes away tomorrow", and I highly doubt that we'd be able to resurrect branch-based "offline" banking in a single day.

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    • sim7c00 11 days ago

      i like that you speak towards humans not being hopeless without the internet. its true. they depend on it a lot, but can easily adapt..

      i do beleive though that it would be only a temporary thing.

      on a local level you can likely still enable a lot of stuff. the internet would most likely die due to a decision to disable it rather than mass equipment failure. also very unlikely, as a ton of people must disable it at the same time, knowing all full well the result of doing so...

      if they do that so u can try to get a radio broadcast up with some equipment thats strapped to houses and appartment buildings eveywhere these days. see if some antennas can be enabled for telephony locally etc. get the spark going for getting a network back up. for isp equipment the same. you can enable and if needed reprogram/configure a lot of field equipment and enable local networks. perhaps depending on your locality even more (internet exchange and isp data centers are close to some people atleast).

      quite sure it would be up and running again in no time locally. at some point networks would merge and an internet would form again...

      all in all there's really not a lot anyone can do about it if people want to use these existing networks and equipment. unless they start cutting power to very large areas etc. etc., remove the equipment everywhere, or ourposefuly destroy it... - this line of thought is extremely unrealistic.

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    • self_awareness 11 days ago

      > While we don't have forests of paper, we have pocket-sized computers that can talk peer to peer and store practically infinite amounts of transactions.

      And how do we know that someone's pocket computer doesn't contain a forged list of transactions that never happened, or is missing some transactions that did happen?

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    • woleium 11 days ago

      not right now we don’t, imagine trying to make software without the internet.

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      • wongarsu 11 days ago

        My autocomplete and documentation work offline. Not being able to download new libraries would suck, but as long as you have the necessary tools installed it wouldn't be too bad.

        It's not that long ago that software was distributed on CD and tutorials in printed books. The internet adds a lot of convenience and productivity, but it's hardly a requirement.

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gorbypark 10 days ago

For sure food, water and etc are going to be the hardest to acquire. I live in Valencia which just had some massive flooding. The city of Valencia itself survived unscathed since they rerouted the river here in 1954, but the outskirts are completely devastated. The grocery stores in the city have more or less been empty across the entire city for the last week. Supplies are still getting in, but the slight increase in demand (all the people in the affected areas need to come into the city for groceries) along with panic buying make me realize in a true SHTF situation that we'd be completely screwed.

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  • BrandoElFollito 10 days ago

    We saw a lot of this from France - I was wondering whether people got out of the city massively or whether they stayed?

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rgbswan 11 days ago

6 weeks tops until everything would run on LoRa (again), with nothing but important info, no ads, and all in TUIs, mmmmmmmhhhhhh

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hinkley 10 days ago

So grumpy.

It's the equivalent of "if your house was burning down what would you grab?"

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tenpies 11 days ago

I was thinking about this too.

My most likely "internet down" scenario would be my local government deciding to launch a national firewall, probably under the guise of "combatting disinformation, malinformation, misinformation, and foreign interference".

For that scenario I need as many VPNs as possible, a VPS in a friendly jurisdiction, and a TOR browser.

If the "internet is down" for "good", it's hard to me to think of a scenario where it didn't bring down the rest of civilization down along with it.

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  • chgs 10 days ago

    In the U.K. a Thames barrier failure would (amongst a lot of London) wipe out the vast majority of switching capacity. Sure there’s slough and a few smaller IXPs but not enough for the capacity.

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