If the Internet collapses....

How Stuff Works, a website that I haven't visited for more than nine years now, has an interesting article  about what would happen to our lives if the internet collapsed. It's not clear to me at what point exactly during the last nine years, they went from their core positioning of explaining how things work to speculating about the implications of if they don't.

Now there is nothing wrong in changing one's core positioning or belief. I mean there are bigger guys than How Stuff Works (henceforth called HSW) who claimed their philosophy was to do one thing really really well, but ended up rolling out hundreds of half-baked products. Now don't even get me started on the "Doing No Evil.. " thing, but then I digress.

Coming back to HSW's article, these guys make an honest attempt, but fail way short in understanding the catastrophic effect of such an event. They waste way too much time worrying about trivial matters such as loss of jobs, impact on the economy, political crisis etc that they completely ignore some more fundamental issues. So how serious impact exactly would the collapsed internet have on your life? The short answer is "very", much more that HSW wants you to believe. Let's address some of them -

Imagine the day you wake up and realize that people can actually use more than 140 characters when they communicate? No matter what anyone tells you, believe me when I say that we are simply not prepared for such a world. None of us have any idea what that 141st character would be. But something tells me it won't be pretty.

And the worse part is, after few decades, once the world get accustomed to this fact, it will expect you to use more than 140 characters in your conversations too, and no you can't just add hashtags to sound cool.

Imagine a world where if you have to call someone an a**h*** you have to do it in their face and not as some cool, brave anonymous guy in a discussion forum. Imagine how difficult it would be to have arguments with a fellow human being or a group of fellow human beings if you have to actually be there in person to do it and you have to use your real name. You can't postpone buying that health insurance with Accidental Medical Expense (AME) rider any longer.

You can no longer have 500 friends who you have never met and have no intention of meeting, but who are always there to fertilize your farms, to send you illegal transaction record, to share all their greatest achievements; such as removing fish hooks from another friend's tank, and lastly, not to forget, friends who are always more than willing to poke you.

In a world without internet, when you go to office, you have to actually look at some applications on your computer other than the one with the blue "e" icon (or the earth on fire icon). If you didn't pay attention during that induction training 12 years back, you are screwed.

Now, if you are thinking that you can still somehow manage to get by with all these issues, I'm sorry to inform you that I've been saving the worst news for the end. Imagine the worst thing that can ever happen to you. What happens when the thing that you love most, the one thing that has been holding your life together is taken away from you? Still didn't get it? I've one word for you.. PORN

Downloading and watching pornography is what has historically separated human beings from animals. (Not sure if it has changed though in recent past. Someone should do a market sizing exercise for the porn industry among animals. Given the fact that some of the animals, with sheer determination and hard work, have made it to the industry as actors, it's quite likely that they might have developed a fan following among their species. But that topic needs a separate and much lengthier post).

If the internet collapses, suddenly this beautiful world of free porn is taken away from us. What do we do next? Go back to buying magazines? Paint our walls with erotic pictures (an art form which, by the way, was lost when our ancestors moved out of caves)? For married men like me, it's not that easy. Where do we hide the porn? Gone are the days of saving 500 GBs of videos in a folder named "Work > Legal > Important Documents". Yeah, sure you can stuff it under the mattress. But how long before it starts piling up and your wife starts to notice the bulge (on the mattress, of course).

Thankfully, HSW assures us that the internet is a tough cookie and such an eventuality is pretty remote. But I'm not so sure. It wont hurt us to be prepared, will it? So go ahead and buy that 24 month subscription of penthouse magazines as soon as you can. That site won't be there for long.