What If The Internet Had Never Been Invented?
What if the internet had never been invented? Over at Middle Age Lady Rage writer Laura Preble recently wrote an essay titled A World Without The Internet.
In it she discusses a New York Times article about an Amazon rain forest tribe called the Marubo people who live along Ituí River, and what happened when the 2,000 person strong tribe had their lives interrupted by the arrival of Starlink, Elon Musk’s high speed satellite internet service. Starlink arrived in Brazil in 2022 and rapidly swept across the giant nation and penetrated into its deepest jungles.
Read her story here: https://preble.substack.com/p/a-world-without-the-internet
At first, I was just going to make a comment on the newsletter. But this is something I’ve often mused about myself, but never really researched it.
First, a word about the “before times”.
CompuServe was an early online information service based in Columbus, Ohio.
I distinctly remember days of the Mosiac browser, the day in 1995 when I started learning HTML code, the day that Prof. Robert Pollin, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Pollin an economist who was then teaching at the University of California, Riverside, showed me actual internet for the first time. I was already using an online service called CompuServe, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe which was sort of like a private early internet, and I’d experienced Prodigy, a bizarre joint venture of CBS, IBM and Sears and Roebuck. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_(online_service) and America Online, yet another internet forerunner that was briefly very popular.
My home computer at he time, a mighty Epson Equity 1, had a modem enabling me connect to the early services on online, and I was familiar with the dozens of “bulletin board” electronic message sites that existed in San Diego, where I live.
What have we learned? What if the internet had never been invented? By Gary Geyer
Those were the right before times, and these were the technologies that helped prime the internet klept gusher that would soon arrive.
During this time, I could actually sense the world speeding up as I started doing more work via email, transmitted my first digital photo on deadline and began combing the first newspaper databases for information.
These days, I search using DuckDuckGo most of the time, but that search engine apparently does not tell you how many results there are for your query. So, I turned to the rapidly enshittifing big daddy of search engines, Google.
I searched for items about a world without the internet.
It turns out people have thought about an internet-free world a lot. A whole lot. And, of course, they have posted on the internet about it.
Goggle searches these days apparently deliver a blurb from a story related to the search, as seen below.
Search: a world without the internet
What would happen to the world without internet?
The modern power grid relies on the internet to coordinate power plants and electricity substations. Without it, each country’s national grid has become unbalanced, and local outages escalate into a blackout for most of the world. Gas pipelines have shut down since they rely on power and the internet.
Search: What would happen if the internet suddenly stopped working?
sciencefocus.com
https://www.sciencefocus.com › science › the-thought-ex…
About 3,950,000,000 results
Search: What if there was no Google?
Overall we could say that, the internet world without Google would look very different from the one we know today. Another search engine would likely have taken its place, and the online advertising industry would be very different. We might rely more on directories and bookmarks, and SEO would be very different.
About 10,710,000,000 results
Search: What will happen if the world lost the internet?
The modern power grid relies on the internet to coordinate power plants and electricity substations. Without it, each country’s national grid has become unbalanced, and local outages escalate into a blackout for most of the world
About 1,210,000,000 results
Interestingly, this search returned the same top results as the first search above.
Search: What will happen if internet never existed?
First and foremost, personal communication would take on a completely new form. We would have to send messages and documents via fax and mail without the internet. Imagine having to wait for a message to arrive for days or even weeks. That would make our lives even more difficult to manage.
Jan 17, 2023
About 2,650,000,000 results
A sudden disappearance of internet connectivity would apparently mean global disaster, with civilization rapidly crumbling into chaos, according to the search results.
My first thought was that this just the internet and its current search masters are covering their digital butts trying to convince anyone who would even THINK about the internet going away just how the world as we know it would come to a horrendous end.
And no Google? FORGETABOUTIT, the mighty Google search algorithm selected results will tell you. Life on earth would be over overnight.
You can’t put the internet genie back in the bottle, so I’ll concentrate on what the world might be like if the internet remained a secret military technology and Al Gore never came along to allow the government-created communication beast to become commercialized.
The first result returned and quoted by Google comes from a site called Medium, which is for writers to post stuff and is sort of like Substack only with fewer Nazis. It was written by a person named Muhammad Ahmad and posted Jan. 13, 2023. It appeared first on a site called Cyberaver, https://www.cyberaver.com/ but I could not get the original version form that site load.
Let’s take look at the four excerpted sentences from this search result and I will annotate them:
First and foremost, personal communication would take on a completely new form.
This would be more like the OLD forms of communication, the ones that existed before about 1995. Remember, in this world the internet NEVER existed. This means that ZERO people would know what they were missing without the internet.
We would have to send messages and documents via fax and mail without the internet.
OMG! Really. Days or weeks. Fax and the mail! Oh my!
I’m old enough to clearly remember these primitive times.
As a journalist I reported and conducted whole investigations, wrote hundreds of stories, using only the telephone, which was connected to a wire that came out of the wall, and fax machines, which were a way of sending documents over phone lines, for those of you too young to remember that technology. Amazingly, work got done, deadlines met, stories published in things called newspapers and magazines, which were a way on conveying information using paper and ink, before ink was exclusively used for tattooing.
Imagine having to wait for a message to arrive for days or even weeks.
OMG! Again. See above.
That would make our lives even more difficult to manage.
Again, the internet never existed in this world, so you would not know what you were missing or not missing. “Even more difficult to manage,” implying that even with the internet and call phones our lives are still difficult to manage.
Without the internet, if it had never been invented, the world would indeed be a different place. Just the way it was a different place before electricity, antibiotics or Ronald Reagan.
Would it be a better place? That’s impossible to say since we are essentially in the realm of fictional alternative history here.
I can tell you what it’s like if you withdraw a portion of your life from internet-enabled technologies, mainly alleged “social” media.
I stopped using Facebook and Twitter entirely in 2016. I tried to close my Facebook account but due to technical “gotcha” on Facebook’s part, I’m not allowed to do that. But that is another story.
Shortly after that my Twitter account, which I had since Jan. 7, 2007, was frozen for “posting too fast.” I was informed I could have it back if I begged forgiveness from Twit. Nope. Never went back.
Do I miss Facebook and Twitter? No. Not having these time leeches in my life is occasionally inconvenient. I feel lucky since anyone trying to run a business or promote a product or themselves is simply addicted to these technologies out of necessity.
After that I remained on LinkedIn, which used to be sort a more adult Facebook, and YouTube, which I consider an entertainment site. I still have websites, like the one you are reading this story on right now.
I use Substack like a social media platform just to promote what I write since I do not think Substack is very well run and its management is dishonest.
Last year, I joined Mastodon and Spoutible, which are much like Twit only without the bad Musk and using a different technology that lacks mass surveillance. I sort of enjoy Mastodon, where people are generally nice and more thoughtful. It is run by numerous individuals all running individual servers and there is no profit motive. I know, right?
But I digress from the point. What if the internet had never been invented? Would things “better”?
That’s impossible to say. The internet has by no means been a completely positive technology. That much seems obvious. At the mercy of capitalists, the internet has become more of an oppressive, money-making surveillance tool rather than a democratizing tool giving access to information and education.
Now a tribe of people who until just a few months ago were living a simple life in the Amazon rainforest can order products from a monopolistic company named for the complex and rapidly disappearing place that is their home. They can and have joined Facebook where they can be taken advantage of by a consumer culture filled with scammers. It seems to hurting their culture, but none of them want to give up being online.
I’m not sure this is progress.
So, hat if the internet had never been invented?
If the internet had never been invented I think as individual people we would be living in a slower-paced, more personally peaceful world, with less hysterics lacking the constant psychic assault from tsunamis of mostly useless information and disinformation. The internet is at best a mixed blessing, creating as many problems as it has solved, destroying human institutions and replacing them with machine-based ways that we, as people, think we can’t live without. The internet has conveniently created collective amnesia about the way things were “before”.
Soon, no one who remembered the before times will be left, and the machine will be us.