Comment by 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.
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.
> 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!
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.
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.
> Ie: maybe I trust a mechanism by Google/Apple where tap becomes powered locally and the phone/device itself carries a balance.
That's something I'd definitely love to see, but it doesn't exist at the moment (in the US, at least; in Japan, there are stored-value cards in Apple Wallet that can support two-side offline transactions).
> Also, credit cards used to work in a similar way to checks. The information would be recorded and the transaction would be finalized later.
They used to, but they don't anymore. Almost all terminals and many cards won't let you do an offline transaction these days, for both credit and debit cards.
> 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.
True, but unfortunately as far as I can see, it's all been moving towards a more centralized/connection-dependent system. That's great for when everything is working as expected, but raises some concerns about resilience.
>> it’s pretty fascinating how currency has evolved
> it's all been moving towards a more centralized/connection-dependent system. That's great [...] but raises some concerns about resilience.
Agreed. I hope that someone in these giant fintech institutions has considered that. It wouldn't surprise me if it's "not seen as a priority" though.
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?
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
The entire open source ecosystem will be gone. Distribution on CD (or USB sticks) would be okay for delivering software, but not viable for frequently exchanging patches among a large group of developers in different parts of the world.
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.