... if Russia or China or Iran or whoever managed with whatever means to shut down the Internet for some period of time. The world has become so dependent on this technology that I believe such an event would cause societal extremis. Just imagine:
- The millions if not billions of people being deprived of their latest news fix from the many Internet sites that now substitute for newspapers. Then a robbery in Peoria or a flood in Perth would not seem quite so important ...
- Social media no longer giving millennials and the other young "gens" the latest updates of the going-ons in their electronic tribe. Face to face communication might just reappear ...
- Tweeters and other instant-message purveyors not being able to comment in real-time to the latest political and social outrages. Politics would then become less strident ...
- Bloggers and other opinion writers being constrained to the lethal gauntlet of trying to get their letters to the editor published in their dying local newspaper ...
- The lack of a e-mail capability making snail-mail letters and FAXes the fallback methods of text communications. Postal carrier mail delivery loads would therefore skyrocket ...
- Television news and opinion programming being deprived of the wellspring of news items from around the world ... instead, being forced to report only about local fires, weddings and traffic accidents ...
- Terrorists and [blank] Lives Matter protesters not being able to coordinate the logistics of their sit-ins or suicide bombings. Wouldn't that be a shame? ...
- Stock market trading being required to go through a telephone call to a broker ... trading volumes would decline dramatically ...
- On-line shopping disappearing ... Amazon, Alibaba, etc. would quickly fold and dying shopping malls would suddenly be reborn. UPS and FedEx package volumes would crater ...
- On-line banking, credit card transactions and money transfers vanishing. Cash would reemerge as the primary unit of commerce ...
But now thinking about it, I'm not entirely sure that the world would be that much worse off ...
Afterward: I forgot ... imagine all the government workers who would be forced to be productive instead of watching porn all day ...
Just trashing the GPS satellite network would cause *huge* disruptions. It is less resilient than the IP network and could be compromised by just one giant coronal mass ejection.
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