No Stupid Questions

I doubt it. We all want to believe that a quick loss of service will cause societal collapse but the reality is people are much more resilient.

Think back to the nyc blackout in 2003, you’d think it would result in mad max style craziness.

But what actually happened was most folks chilling out together with no real crime wave and the only issue was bodegas overcharging fools for ice cubes.

I say this provided that the blackout was temporary.

If the shit was permanent then that’s a different issue. At a certain point insulin goes bad, antibiotics go bad, everything rots and you have a different scenario entirely.

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.

Depends how fast banking catches up, and how much cash is still around.

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.

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.

No online pr0n? It would mean the end of the world as we know it. 😱

Depends 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.

Don't do it, JC! The Illuminati will use it to seize control!

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.

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.

No, but I'm working from home so would need to go to the office... as a software developer it would hit hard!

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.

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.