by ReverseEngineer » Tue 23 Dec 2008, 19:52:53
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('gnm', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('nobodypanic', 'F') the internet. i'd rather ride free across the plains with the wind in my hair.
only a madman would voluntary accept these clever shackles for something so silly as the internet.
LOL w/Ludi...
Clever shackles? I'm guessing you have never heard of "Freenets" and such - people building and linking their own networks and even setting up remote relays.
Much as I love the image of Hawkeye with an iPhone, the likelihood of maintaining the net once society devolves down to roaming tribes of hunter gatherers is pretty small of course. Besides the issue of generating all the power for the servers is of course manufacturing computers, although with die off there are probably enough around to last several hundred years recycling the chips. The screen displays would give out though in probably 10 years.
On the "clever shackles" issue, because the internet is such a fabulous means for TPTB to collect data about everyone who uses it, it will be kept up and running for some time I imagine. It is pretty much essential for any business still being done, and when it does go dark it will definitely be chaotic to say the least everywhere. At that point you can't use digital bits for trading, you have to return to paper or more likely barter by then.
In the short term however, displaced homeless people won't have that much trouble accessing the net. There are alwas open networks around, and if you can at least cough up $20/mo you can keep your own account on one of the bigger wireless providers with lots of hotspots.
One interesting thing to watch would be to see when Google runs into falling Ad revenues becuase not enough businesses are going that will advertise, and not enough consumers will Click and Buy off a Google Ad. At that point, Google will step up to the trough for a Goobermint Bailout, and become explicitly a Goobermint Agency attached to the FBI or CIA or NSA.
I can see private networks emerging sending encrypted digital information across the HAM frequencies at some point. Such delocalized networks would be extremely difficult to pin down, especially without oil to drive FCC trucks around triangulating the location of the transmitters, which can be portable and move about. I had a friend who ran a Pirate Radio station in NYC for a number of years, I actually had my own show on that station in my early teens. You might check out the movie "Pump Up the Volume" with Christian Slater in his younger days, its a fun movie about Pirate Radio.
The internet is part and parcel of the complex infrastructure that developed to support 6.7B people on the planet. Its necessary to handle all the transactions of so many businesses, and much softwaare is now centralized on servers rather than being provided on disks you can buy in a big box store. This way, you have to pay subscrition fees to use the software rather than owning it, and its more difficult to pirate. I stick with all old software I have from around 2000 which mostly can be loaded on any functioning computer, I have copies of Linux as well as old versions of the Windows OP system to boot up any computer off the net. The net might go down, but I'll keep my computer and my backup computers running a while longer, hopefully until I give myself up to the Bear.
Reverse Engineer