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I have been thinking about this a lot and though I'm not at all an expert it seems like people just assume the internet will always be accesible and exist forev

I have been thinking about this a lot and though I'm not at all an expert it seems like people just assume the internet will always be accesible and exist forever no matter what happens to human civilization, which is obviously not the case. There are thousands of companies that make the thing work as effectively as it does and as we are seeing with the labor shortage, relatively small shocks impact the company in big ways. I doubt the cloud would be _that affected in the case of a US civil war but I could see it if there was an economic collapse on the scale of the great depression. I think a us civil war is rather unlikely and people will sort themselves into red states/blue states with potential succession long before there is widespread violence. Economic collapse seems far more likely and would be much more damaging.

throwaway6532 5y ago
Any particular angle on how such a collapse might come about? The biggest threats I see are the debt problems in the Chinese property sector explode causing their "commercial paper" market to set off a chain reaction causing global contagion due to China being nearly everyone's number one trading partner. Or the US has an internal conflict and that majorly affects things (which is what I'm considering in this question). The other is simply demographics spell the writing on the wall that populations will continue to shrink and shrink and I would imagine it potentially gets to a point where the amount of infrastructure we've built the modern world on top of wouldn't have sufficient human capital to keep it running below a certain critical threshold of population size, but that one is a bit longer off.
- gregjor 5y ago
  All of those scenarios would create much more urgent and immediate problems than losing access to Twitter or Jira. Banking, for example. Food, energy, transportation would all suffer, globally. The Chinese economy and internal US conflicts are out of your control, so they merit as much worry as an asteroid strike. We’re suffering through a global pandemic now and the internet has so far survived. If demographics worry you get busy having children.

throwaway6532 5y ago

Any particular angle on how such a collapse might come about? The biggest threats I see are the debt problems in the Chinese property sector explode causing their "commercial paper" market to set off a chain reaction causing global contagion due to China being nearly everyone's number one trading partner. Or the US has an internal conflict and that majorly affects things (which is what I'm considering in this question). The other is simply demographics spell the writing on the wall that populations will continue to shrink and shrink and I would imagine it potentially gets to a point where the amount of infrastructure we've built the modern world on top of wouldn't have sufficient human capital to keep it running below a certain critical threshold of population size, but that one is a bit longer off.

gregjor 5y ago
All of those scenarios would create much more urgent and immediate problems than losing access to Twitter or Jira. Banking, for example. Food, energy, transportation would all suffer, globally. The Chinese economy and internal US conflicts are out of your control, so they merit as much worry as an asteroid strike. We’re suffering through a global pandemic now and the internet has so far survived. If demographics worry you get busy having children.