We need to prepare for the world without Internet.

This week, three things happened in quick succession: Australia passed a law banning people under 16 from being on social media, South Korea had a randezvous with it's past and Locals started requiring a Rumble account. Now, it could be that my threat-detection sense is being hyperactive, but to me this looks like "they" are making a go for atomizing The People and preventing us from talking to one another without "them" knowing exactly who says what to whom. Ideally, this would be prevented but a prudent person prepares for all options. In this case, that means not having Internet access, because access to post-Internet is not the same.

I thought about it a little and I think that will result in a massive drop of quality of life, that can't be mitigated without reestablishing Internet. There are innumerable situations and instances where no other source of information can cover for loss of Internet. Only on Internet can you swing from learning about clothing styles to high-rise architecture to computer science without breaking your stride. You can't do that in books. I actually have an old Larousse encyclopedia and at one point I decided to match it up with Wikipedia, to see how it fares. It turns out Larousse has nothing on clothing, and only a few pages on medicine. It fails completely to match Wikipedia. Interestingly, I just used Wikipedia to check the spelling of Larousse and it turns out Larousse is supposed to be in ten volumes, but I only have three. The thing I have seems complete in the sense there don't seem to be any missing volumes, but it might be an abridged version. See, how would I know that if not for Wikipedia? But Wikipedia is just one faced of Internet, and arguably not the most important. The most important part of Internet is the fact almost anybody can setup a website and write mostly what they want there. For this reason, no selection of magazines, no matter how diverse, will ever be able to match Internet in coverage. Magazines are simply produced by a much smaller number of people. Furthermore, because people die and are born, magazines have to occationally revisit topics that have already been covered, thus wasting space on things older readers already know. On Internet, you can keep an archive of older posts and people can always go and view them.

I know people will say Internet is already locked down and non-private but the protocols themselves are perfectly anonymous. You can still go to a coffie shop in another town and use their public WiFi to talk Revolution with like-minded individuals. And you'll eventually do this because no government is impeccable and eventually every government needs to be rebelled against. It's the cycle of life, for states. :) You can also use the same public WiFi to talk with the strangest folk all over the world. This levels the barriers and fosters a better world where everyone collects all the best they can find from all over the world. These things can't be had without Internet. The moment you associate a real-world ID with everyone who uses the Post-Internet, self-censorship and a host of other malaises take over. Not to mention the ability "they" will gain to model society mathematically. And having an offline stash and buying music on CDs and owning physical copies of all media won't help these things. If Internet can't be saved, than preparing for a world without Internet entails primarily figuring out how to handle these problems.

Bonus points if you can figure out how to live "normally" if you're not on Post-Internet, but all the other people around you are and they get their programming from it. :/