The Internet Will Destroy All Humans!

Way up here in the mountains, our options for internet access are somewhat limited. High-speed cable internet is available in some parts of the Valley, and when the country's leading provider of same finally strings it out to our location, we will happily take them up on the fantastic money-saving thrice-weekly offer we've been receiving via the Postal Service for the last four years. Last week, a DHL express envelope arrived with my name on it; I got all excited and ripped it open, anticipating an acceptance notice from a literary journal informing me that one of my stories had been selected for publication, but, no, it was another exclusive offer for high-speed cable internet. This sort of thing frequently provokes outbursts of homicidal rage and usually results in spousal mandate that I put down the sword, drink some water, and apologize to the mailman. I have delivered numerous wrathful tirades to innocent and undeserving call-center workers demanding that their employer immediately cease the senseless slaughter of thousands of trees for the sole purpose of offering me a highly desirable service which it lacks the logistical infrastructure to provide, but still the onslaught continues. With the benefit of foresight, we could have saved quite a bit of money by when we moved here by purchasing an empty piece of land, putting up a mailbox, and living in a military surplus GP-medium tent until we accumulated enough raw material to build a three-bedroom home with billiards room and attached garage. Nevertheless, I will be waiting at the window with phone in hand, ready to sign up the very instant the installation crew runs the line past my house. 

Until salvation arrives, however, we are saddled with sattelite internet, which is overpriced, unreliable, governed by draconian and often inscrutable regulations, and monopolized by a single company which doesn't really care if its customers are happy or not, just as long as they pay their exorbitant fees every month. At the time I am writing this, our sattelite dish has been out of commission for just over a week; surprisingly, everyone is still alive. It has been very difficult for my wife, in her role as All-Powerful High Potentate of the family business, to do any banking or place orders with suppliers. Even worse than that, however, is having been out of contact with the majority of the people with whom we regularly interact for a disturbingly long period of time. I have had no communication with my submission service, long-distance friends, writing trustees, and various conversant publishers. I am plagued with visions of being passed up for publication because I didn't respond to an email in time. My mother called to make sure we were alright because she'd been texting me for two days without reply. My wife and I have both experienced a novel variant of cabin fever without the ability to instantly acquire random information on whatever topic our whim dictates.

All of this makes me feel rather spoiled. I think about the prehistoric hunter-gatherer who was basically screwed if his stone axe shattered and no replacement was available. I think about the Somali fisherman whose family goes hungry when his boat is under repair. I think about the World War Two cryptographers who cracked the German ENIGMA code with less computing power than can be found within a 20-foot radius of where I'm sitting. I think about a time long, long ago when there was no Internet, and yet somehow the world managed to stave off the Apocalypse every day, and I realize that I am a very spoiled person. Being the rugged survivalist types that we and most other Mainers are, Mrs. Benson and I are perfectly capable of surviving for days without electricity, but here we are going stir-crazy without access to hourly-incremental weather forecasts, pictures of my aunt with her new haircut, and the name of that actor who's in that movie we want to see and who was also in that other movie with Willem Dafoe.

For decades, science fiction writers have prophecized a dystopian future in which mankind's dominion of the Earth is eclipsed by highly advanced computers, but occurs to me that this troubling scenario may have become reality. True, there are no cold, logical AIs pragmatically declaring that the human race has become obsolete; there is no autonomous military defense network wiping us out with the very weapons from which it was designed to protect us; there are no predatory, self-replicating robots subjugating the entire species and using us for slave labor or turning us into living batteries. There is only an undirected, pervasive, omnipresent digital communication network which has, in the span of a single generation, become so vital that society can no longer function without it. What would happen to us if the Internet suddenly disappeared? Would the global economy still possess the ability to function the way it did twenty years ago, or would the world be instantly and irrevocably plunged into fiscal anarchy? Would there be an epidemic of mass suicide when millions people who had grown accustomed to receiving regular updates concerning the mundane and utterly uninteresting activies of distant acquaintances realized the horrible truth that each one of us is, in the metaphysical sense, absolutely alone in the Universe? Would I finally overcome my violent allergy to emoticons? Until the guy comes to fix our dish, these and many other very important questions must go unanswered.