As I was hiking in the forest, I was thinking about life before we had the internet. It seems so long ago, but I remember when Ma Bell was a thing. We had a party line that started with Alpine 4. I memorized our phone number when I was in kindergarten. My mother had that phone number almost until the day she died.
Now she’s gone, and so is Ma Bell, but we have lots of other monopolies that have insinuated themselves into the fabric of our lives so thoroughly that it is hard to imagine life without them. I’m thinking of Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Comcast, Walmart . . . I used to live without these things. What would my life would be like if I didn’t have them anymore?
Or if I chose not to have them?
Some pundits are recommending boycotts. Boycotting Disney for cancelling one of my favorite late night talk show hosts is one thing. Boycotting Google would be like deciding not to breathe. For one thing, it would kill me. For another, Google would not care. One dead user means nothing. There are a billion more where I came from.
I’m not an Apple person, but I am a Microsoft person. I’ve researched alternatives to Windows and Office. Learning new software would be a challenge given the unwillingness of my tired brain, but I could do it. If Microsoft went bankrupt, I’d figure out something.
If Google failed, I’d devise a workaround somehow. Some other calendar system, some other search engine. Email would be okay: I still use yahoo, which is only a few days newer than aol. As long as I have internet access, I could live without Google.
What about Amazon? I remember when Amazon was an online bookstore. Nobody thought people would buy books online. Look at us now. Amazon sells everything, literally everything. You can buy a house on Amazon. Shopping would be more difficult without Amazon, but it could be done. Imagine going to local business to shop everyday, not just one day a year. I’m not including Walmart in that group of small businesses. If Amazon went down, I personally would be affected: Amazon KDP sells my books. But there are alternatives, as long as I have access to the internet.
But what if the entire internet collapsed? What would not be affected, considering many sectors of the world infrastructure and economy depend on the internet to function? Electrical grids would fail, causing gasoline pumps to cease pumping. What else would stop working? Communications, banking and finance, air traffic control, modern hospitals, modern schools, and horror of horrors, social media, streaming, and online shopping. So says an AI summary.
We wouldn’t have telephones anymore, at least not ones that rely on the internet or the power grid. Corded landline phones would work until the phone companies’ backup generators stopped producing power. By then, I expect all the phone company employees would have gone home to circle their wagons.
Maybe I should consider brushing up on my siphoning skills. Or I could just punch a hole in someone else’s gas tank, assuming they still had gas, of course. I used to watch the Walking Dead, until I couldn’t anymore. Besides running from walkers, the characters spent a lot of time searching for food, water, and gas. Maybe consider watching old episodes yourself, for research purposes.
I am thinking I need to get one of those survival books that show how we can survive after the apocalypse. You know, how to forage for wild plants, how to grow and process our own food, how to generate our own energy without destroying the environment. Pioneers figured out how to do it, maybe not gracefully but they survived to pass on their genes to us. Of course, they killed a lot of native people in the process, but we don’t have to do that, right?
One thing that will keep working is guns. Until we run out of ammo, which probably won’t happen in my lifetime, we should be able to defend our gas supplies, our patch of land, our water cisterns, and our food stores. Not to mention our child-bearing women, so we can repopulate after the apocalypse is over.
You might be saying, Carol, what is your problem? How about looking on the bright side for a change? My response, besides asking you why you care what I think, is to look around and tell me what you are seeing. Because if you aren’t seeing what is happening, then you won’t survive the apocalypse. Assuming you want to, of course.