7 ms·

What if (and hear me out), the internet had a shut-down period, say, once a month, on a sunday or so. What would society look like? What kind of changes would w

by dt3ft 5y ago

What if (and hear me out), the internet had a shut-down period, say, once a month, on a sunday or so. What would society look like? What kind of changes would we see? (provided, emergency services stay reachable).

grecy 5y ago
You could just ask your parents. If you want to know about life before TV, just ask your grandparents.
- overcast 5y ago
  No, just removing the internet doesn't revert life back to the time before it. They are asking what would our "today" look like if we had an internet day of rest once a week. Maybe people would have a regular get together day?
  - ghaff 5y ago
    The problem is that a huge number of things that weren't dependent on network connectivity now are. Now, having said that, in many places in the US, stores were mostly closed on Sunday so it sort of was a "day of rest" in many places.
DicIfTEx 5y ago
The cynic in me expects we'd see vociferous lobbying from the usual suspects for endless expansion of what traffic falls under the excluded ‘emergency’ category.
resoluteteeth 5y ago
I guess people would stay inside, not be able to talk to anyone, not be able to check public transit schedules, not be able to use maps unless they had downloaded them in advance, and probably not be able to use credit cards to buy food (assuming supermarkets and restaurants would even bother to be open).
- ghaff 5y ago
  You do realize that people were able to go out on Sunday and do things before there was an Internet that they could connect to and that stores were often closed. And that they could make plans in advance if they were meeting someone or going somewhere.
  - resoluteteeth 5y ago
    Yes but I don't know if people would be willing to deal with those things now.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      I don't know. Normally, I often get together with friends on a weekend day. We coordinate things beforehand via email but we mostly don't really need Internet otherwise.
viraptor 5y ago
> provided, emergency services stay reachable Define "emergency services". Are online maps showing me the route to the hospital an emergency service? What about online translation service useful in emergency abroad? What about online bank access for emergency funds? Etc... We really got to the utility stage of the internet where half the services can be an "emergency" service in some context. But on the other extreme, you can have a look at more strict Jewish communities where one day every week is a no-internet day. I'm not sure if you're looking for personal or society changes, but I've been doing a completely non-religious tech-Sabbath day occasionally. It's a nice, relaxing experience. Nothing mind-altering though.
- ghaff 5y ago
  That's a fair answer. If the question is whether people could live without Netflix, email, Facebook, Wikipedia, etc. for one day a month, at least my answer would be "of course, without breaking a sweat." But if you posit a general lack of network connectivity, you're right that it means that most services that we take for granted would be down including things like e.g. buying gas.
  - jrochkind1 5y ago
    On the other hand, if we had started years ago regularly arbitrarily shut down the internet for a day, as apparently Syria does, we probably wouldn't have come to rely on the internet for so much basic infrastructure. I doubt buying gas is down in Syria when they shut down the internet. It's not realistic to think that could have happened in the USA, but it's interesting to think about. As a software engineer who knows how unreliable and vulnerable our software infrastructure is, I don't love how much of society is dependent upon it.
    - jrochkind1 5y ago
      (and the other piece is, I doubt the US government has the ability to easily "shut down the internet" for a day -- at least I hope they don't, although they might, they shouldn't, and if they do it shouldn't be easy or expected. Cause they would definitely use that ability for nefarious ends).
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
sneak 5y ago
Many people would lose access to transportation of many different kinds. Some people might lose their jobs. Some people would lose access to their usual forms of delivered food, and would have to prepare in advance (buying food on Saturday to have on hand the next day).
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
There’s nothing stopping people from taking a day off of the internet if they want. Forcing everyone off the internet via government control is a step too far.
- Tempest1981 5y ago
  Still an interesting thought experiment.
- blfr 5y ago
  There's nothing stopping people from taking a day off individually but it's still a coordination problem. You might want to spend time with other people. Much like setting a market day in medieval towns.
  - foxpurple 5y ago
    Without the internet it would be rather difficult to coordinate anything with others since you can’t contact them. I assume phone and sms is included in this blockout since they run over the internet now and could be used to build the internet from scratch if excluded.
lagadu 5y ago
No electronic payments? We'd see most people unable to pay for gas or food, huge economic impact from that alone. I guess this would vary by country but plenty of us live in countries where live money is seldomly used.
mananaysiempre 5y ago
I’d guess it’d be similar to how some European cities prohibit all large retailers (including food stores) from opening on Sunday, except a hell of a lot more expensive. You’d need extra shifts on site, redundant local networks for emergency services, redundant links for phone companies, extra space in ports and warehouses, special contingency plans, etc. And all of that gets excercised 1/30 less often than usual so is more prone to failure—in a situation of where communication is degraded in the first place. An ISOC report on government Internet shutdowns (https://www.internetsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/ISOC-PolicyBrief-Shutdowns-2019.pdf https://www.internetsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/I...) says Zimbabwe lost 5.7 million, or 10% daily GDP, per day during a sudden six-day shutdown. A regular shutdown would be more workable, but given the countries you’re interested in are probably more Internet-dependent than Zimbabwe something on the order of 0.1% GDP when averaged over a month still sounds plausible. For scale, the US federal government spends 1.2% GDP on education.
- londons_explore 5y ago
  It is common across lots of Europe for most or all shops to be closed on Sundays. The local population don't view that as odd or inconvenient - simply as 'the way things are'. As a visitor though, it means you need to plan ahead at least 24 hours - if you haven't bought food for sunday by midday saturday, there's a good chance you're going hungry. I would be very interested to know the macroeconomic impact of such a policy. Presumably labor running shops is reduced, but overall sales volume is not, which could outweigh the economic cost of inconvenience for the whole population...
  - dantheman 5y ago
    The local population does view it as inconvenient and many wish that things would be open. Hell, normally at train stations there are some shops that are open and they are packed and cleaned out.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    It was pretty normal in the US as well until a few decades ago. When I was an undergrad, very little in the city I lived was open on a Sunday. I remember it being a nuisance as an undergrad. I often had classes and other things to do during the week and often had sports on Saturday, so finding the time to do shopping runs during the week could be a pain. Historically, the reason was religious. But mom and pop stores also often opposed Sunday opening because large retailers were in a better position to just add incremental staff than they were.
LinuxBender 5y ago
I think it's an interesting thought experiment. Would applications improve their capabilities around caching, local processing, spooling of transactions and treat the internet as the "optimal" state but not required? What services are impossible to process locally? e.g. cache map data, road conditions locally, present a "last updated" time on maps.. purchase things over encrypted sms with some token mechanism, etc...
swiley 5y ago
The internet was empowering to PC users. Now that PCs have mostly been replaced with smartphones we think of it as a bad thing used to feed addictions and serve ads/television because that's what it's become.
tomjen3 5y ago
All websites that allows you to stream things would have a short term download feature. People would use phones to actually call others, which would make them easier to spy on. It would be overall very inconvenient, but some Karens would think it was good for all the young nerds and it would stick around for that reason. It wouldn't get people to meet up in real life much more than they do now, because it would be difficult to organize and it would be difficult to find where you are going without GPS.
stickfigure 5y ago
It would look like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eruv https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eruv People would use crazy contortions of logic to figure out how to enable the internet and do what they want to do anyway. "Emergency" services, you say? It would normalize "on Sundays we put on uniforms so we can access the internet". In a generation or two, not wearing fireman's turnouts on Sunday would be considered sinful. In a couple more generations, there would be violent street clashes between the fireman-uniform denominations and the police-uniform denominations.
jjk166 5y ago
Probably the same thing that would happen if we shut off electricity or running water for one day a month. There's no reason everyone suffer because a small handful of people lack the self discipline to disconnect.
awb 5y ago
There are plenty of rural towns and homesteads with no cell or Internet service in the US where this is the reality 24/7. Even here in the Bay Area in the Santa Cruz mountains and in Big Sur there are places like that and people living a fully disconnected lifestyle. So from a personal / family point of view, it would probably feel like the 80s or early 90s. You'd have modern amenities with landlines being the primary form of connection. From a business / services perspective, places would have to have more robust backup and service continuity systems in place to keep things running smoothly during the outages. But this is just best practice anyway, so I'm not sure it would have as big an impact as we might think.

by dt3ft 5y ago

grecy 5y ago

You could just ask your parents. If you want to know about life before TV, just ask your grandparents.

overcast 5y ago
No, just removing the internet doesn't revert life back to the time before it. They are asking what would our "today" look like if we had an internet day of rest once a week. Maybe people would have a regular get together day?
- ghaff 5y ago
  The problem is that a huge number of things that weren't dependent on network connectivity now are. Now, having said that, in many places in the US, stores were mostly closed on Sunday so it sort of was a "day of rest" in many places.

DicIfTEx 5y ago

The cynic in me expects we'd see vociferous lobbying from the usual suspects for endless expansion of what traffic falls under the excluded ‘emergency’ category.

resoluteteeth 5y ago

I guess people would stay inside, not be able to talk to anyone, not be able to check public transit schedules, not be able to use maps unless they had downloaded them in advance, and probably not be able to use credit cards to buy food (assuming supermarkets and restaurants would even bother to be open).

ghaff 5y ago
You do realize that people were able to go out on Sunday and do things before there was an Internet that they could connect to and that stores were often closed. And that they could make plans in advance if they were meeting someone or going somewhere.
- resoluteteeth 5y ago
  Yes but I don't know if people would be willing to deal with those things now.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    I don't know. Normally, I often get together with friends on a weekend day. We coordinate things beforehand via email but we mostly don't really need Internet otherwise.

viraptor 5y ago

> provided, emergency services stay reachable Define "emergency services". Are online maps showing me the route to the hospital an emergency service? What about online translation service useful in emergency abroad? What about online bank access for emergency funds? Etc... We really got to the utility stage of the internet where half the services can be an "emergency" service in some context. But on the other extreme, you can have a look at more strict Jewish communities where one day every week is a no-internet day. I'm not sure if you're looking for personal or society changes, but I've been doing a completely non-religious tech-Sabbath day occasionally. It's a nice, relaxing experience. Nothing mind-altering though.

ghaff 5y ago
That's a fair answer. If the question is whether people could live without Netflix, email, Facebook, Wikipedia, etc. for one day a month, at least my answer would be "of course, without breaking a sweat." But if you posit a general lack of network connectivity, you're right that it means that most services that we take for granted would be down including things like e.g. buying gas.
- jrochkind1 5y ago
  On the other hand, if we had started years ago regularly arbitrarily shut down the internet for a day, as apparently Syria does, we probably wouldn't have come to rely on the internet for so much basic infrastructure. I doubt buying gas is down in Syria when they shut down the internet. It's not realistic to think that could have happened in the USA, but it's interesting to think about. As a software engineer who knows how unreliable and vulnerable our software infrastructure is, I don't love how much of society is dependent upon it.
  - jrochkind1 5y ago
    (and the other piece is, I doubt the US government has the ability to easily "shut down the internet" for a day -- at least I hope they don't, although they might, they shouldn't, and if they do it shouldn't be easy or expected. Cause they would definitely use that ability for nefarious ends).

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

sneak 5y ago

Many people would lose access to transportation of many different kinds. Some people might lose their jobs. Some people would lose access to their usual forms of delivered food, and would have to prepare in advance (buying food on Saturday to have on hand the next day).

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

There’s nothing stopping people from taking a day off of the internet if they want. Forcing everyone off the internet via government control is a step too far.

Tempest1981 5y ago
Still an interesting thought experiment.
blfr 5y ago
There's nothing stopping people from taking a day off individually but it's still a coordination problem. You might want to spend time with other people. Much like setting a market day in medieval towns.
- foxpurple 5y ago
  Without the internet it would be rather difficult to coordinate anything with others since you can’t contact them. I assume phone and sms is included in this blockout since they run over the internet now and could be used to build the internet from scratch if excluded.

lagadu 5y ago

No electronic payments? We'd see most people unable to pay for gas or food, huge economic impact from that alone. I guess this would vary by country but plenty of us live in countries where live money is seldomly used.

mananaysiempre 5y ago

I’d guess it’d be similar to how some European cities prohibit all large retailers (including food stores) from opening on Sunday, except a hell of a lot more expensive. You’d need extra shifts on site, redundant local networks for emergency services, redundant links for phone companies, extra space in ports and warehouses, special contingency plans, etc. And all of that gets excercised 1/30 less often than usual so is more prone to failure—in a situation of where communication is degraded in the first place. An ISOC report on government Internet shutdowns (https://www.internetsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/ISOC-PolicyBrief-Shutdowns-2019.pdf https://www.internetsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/I...) says Zimbabwe lost 5.7 million, or 10% daily GDP, per day during a sudden six-day shutdown. A regular shutdown would be more workable, but given the countries you’re interested in are probably more Internet-dependent than Zimbabwe something on the order of 0.1% GDP when averaged over a month still sounds plausible. For scale, the US federal government spends 1.2% GDP on education.

londons_explore 5y ago
It is common across lots of Europe for most or all shops to be closed on Sundays. The local population don't view that as odd or inconvenient - simply as 'the way things are'. As a visitor though, it means you need to plan ahead at least 24 hours - if you haven't bought food for sunday by midday saturday, there's a good chance you're going hungry. I would be very interested to know the macroeconomic impact of such a policy. Presumably labor running shops is reduced, but overall sales volume is not, which could outweigh the economic cost of inconvenience for the whole population...
- dantheman 5y ago
  The local population does view it as inconvenient and many wish that things would be open. Hell, normally at train stations there are some shops that are open and they are packed and cleaned out.
- ghaff 5y ago
  It was pretty normal in the US as well until a few decades ago. When I was an undergrad, very little in the city I lived was open on a Sunday. I remember it being a nuisance as an undergrad. I often had classes and other things to do during the week and often had sports on Saturday, so finding the time to do shopping runs during the week could be a pain. Historically, the reason was religious. But mom and pop stores also often opposed Sunday opening because large retailers were in a better position to just add incremental staff than they were.

LinuxBender 5y ago

I think it's an interesting thought experiment. Would applications improve their capabilities around caching, local processing, spooling of transactions and treat the internet as the "optimal" state but not required? What services are impossible to process locally? e.g. cache map data, road conditions locally, present a "last updated" time on maps.. purchase things over encrypted sms with some token mechanism, etc...

swiley 5y ago

The internet was empowering to PC users. Now that PCs have mostly been replaced with smartphones we think of it as a bad thing used to feed addictions and serve ads/television because that's what it's become.

tomjen3 5y ago

All websites that allows you to stream things would have a short term download feature. People would use phones to actually call others, which would make them easier to spy on. It would be overall very inconvenient, but some Karens would think it was good for all the young nerds and it would stick around for that reason. It wouldn't get people to meet up in real life much more than they do now, because it would be difficult to organize and it would be difficult to find where you are going without GPS.

stickfigure 5y ago

It would look like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eruv https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eruv People would use crazy contortions of logic to figure out how to enable the internet and do what they want to do anyway. "Emergency" services, you say? It would normalize "on Sundays we put on uniforms so we can access the internet". In a generation or two, not wearing fireman's turnouts on Sunday would be considered sinful. In a couple more generations, there would be violent street clashes between the fireman-uniform denominations and the police-uniform denominations.

jjk166 5y ago

Probably the same thing that would happen if we shut off electricity or running water for one day a month. There's no reason everyone suffer because a small handful of people lack the self discipline to disconnect.

awb 5y ago

There are plenty of rural towns and homesteads with no cell or Internet service in the US where this is the reality 24/7. Even here in the Bay Area in the Santa Cruz mountains and in Big Sur there are places like that and people living a fully disconnected lifestyle. So from a personal / family point of view, it would probably feel like the 80s or early 90s. You'd have modern amenities with landlines being the primary form of connection. From a business / services perspective, places would have to have more robust backup and service continuity systems in place to keep things running smoothly during the outages. But this is just best practice anyway, so I'm not sure it would have as big an impact as we might think.