How would you survive if the internet went out for 6 months?

Or like Roby, you gathered round with la famiglia, cranked up the Victrola and sang along to Caruso


"Hey Ma - there's no gabagool in dis thing!"

 

If the internet went down for 6 months, society would collapse.

 

No they wouldn’t, people would lose their shit about not having access to all their distractions, and the people sucked into the alternate realities of their social media feeds would use that information void to blame the people they’ve been conditioned to hate. The psychological fallout would be at least as intense as that to our infrastructure.

 

I think it's worse than that.

I assume industry is highly dependent on the internet. Certainly commerce is. I teach a lot of online classes - those would come to a screeching halt. Without the internet air travel would also ground to a halt (didn't that happen recently with SeaTac Airport?).

 

How well do get along with your neighbors?

 

As long as it happens while I'm on a South Pacific island - my anthropological training will be very useful!

 

Countries with a strong collective spirit and relatively uniform culture would do better.

The US would be ********ed.

 

I actually was in the Peace Corps on a small atoll in the Pacific, living in, essentially, a stick hut for a year and a half without electricity, running water, the whole bit. I didn't miss TV after a month, really. It's amazing what you can get used to when necessary. Of course, as I got closer to getting back to society, my desire to catch up on TV shows and eat a damn cheeseburger were pretty intense. This was over 20 years ago, so who knows if the current generation could function without their accoutrements they've had attached to themselves since birth, but, in my experience, one adapts more easily than you might think.

 

I work in a big building full of food. I'll be fine. My job will be protecting it from the likes of you until we figure things out. Frankly, our supermarket is a lot less high-tech than people think. We could do 90% of our infrastructure tasks just on the phone if we had to. I seem to recall supermarkets existing before the internet. Even credit cards existed then, although they kind of sucked.

I don't think its possible for the internet to be out that long anyway. The whole reason it was started was to make something that would survive a nuclear war.

 

Which atoll? I'm guessing it was either in the Marshall Islands or Federated States of Micronesia.

 

I still have my crystal radio...you can make one too.



I also remember how to play Hopscotch.

 

HAIL GRIMES!!!

 

An atoll in Kiribati, south of those places.

 

It's full of food -- much of which is perishable. Likely the shelves will be picked clean by looters within a week or two.

 

I’d eat cannibals

 

Near Butaritari then?

I'm guessing your name means something in i-Kiribati (if I had to guess I'd go with "old man" or something like that based on some gender terms I'm familiar with for Butaritari).