Maybe I will never know you, if it all goes to hell

Sometimes I wonder what life would be like if the internet went down and never came back again. I think about whether I would still spend so much time staring at the screen then because of habit / dependence. I wonder if I would ever hear or see any of my family who live far away, or online colleagues some living on other continents again.

I am not the first and I have no doubt I won’t be the last to ponder this question, in fact here’s a relevant article from 2018:

Life without internet: What would life be like without the internet?

Most things now depend on the internet to function for example utilities, so the electricity company, the bank, the hospitals in fact all of the basic infrastructure now depends on the internet to be functioning.

Here’s an article from 2021 exploring this same question centered about the centralised internet:

How Resilient is the Internet?

Here’s a direct quote:

“According to computer scientist David Clark, who has been involved with internet design and governance since the days of Arpanet, the following principles existed for the system’s architecture from the outset:

1. Internet communication must continue despite loss of networks or gateways.
2. The Internet must support multiple types of communications service.
3. The Internet architecture must accommodate a variety of networks.
4. The Internet architecture must permit distributed management of its resources.
5. The Internet architecture must be cost effective.
6. The Internet architecture must permit host attachment with a low level of effort.
7. The resources used in the internet architecture must be accountable.

From The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Protocols”

Note how in point 4 is emphasizes the important of having a distributed management, what is happening now?