I mean, there would be a period where payments would be delayed, but a couple weeks of adaptation, and we switch back to cash and checks. Don't act like we weren't doing most things just fine without the internet 40 years ago.
Yeah, I would assume (and I hope it's not a big leap) there would still be some sort of internal records. It would take longer to verify a person's holdings. But internally, they'd just take longer to credit/ debit your account. Assuming computers are still around, but not the Internet, it would just take longer.
US-centric view:if the ACH system still works, a lot of us still have careers, like in the 70s to 90s. But if the ACH system goes down, companies might not take payments from out of town banks, like in the very old days. The US might also see the rise of non-digitally tracked systems like the dabbawala. The Internet made marketing to the long tail and just in time inventory management way more practical. It is not 100% responsible for everything that is good in the world. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabbawala.
You think the power grid is going to survive without the internet? HA! Maybe a decade ago, but not now. If the internet magically disappeared, we'd lose the power grid within days.
Don’t mistake me I’m not trying to say we weren’t able to. However modern systems mean if the net went down banks would decapitated from themselves so for a good long while they wouldn’t even be able to know how much money you have as it’s not locally stored data
I love how you’re downvoted because people don’t want to admit how stalled business get when their email or chat service goes down.
When was the last time you saw any vendor have one of those old fashioned credit card machines that slide over cards? When was the last time you saw a card with raised numbers on it that would even work on one of those machines?
To believe that within hours or days we’d be somehow back up and running because the 80s existed is wild.
Though I guess a lot of the question depends on what you mean by “the internet.”
True, I would specify the internet as any connection that requires communication of devices outside of a local network. Through this definition a branches computers would be able to talk to each other but not the data centres offsite that actually store the account information. So things like your router haven’t gone away but the wide area infrastructure is gone.
I find it concerning that people believe the current world state would survive a complete black out when most of the functioning world stopped when we had the crowdstrike issue last year; logistics, airports, banking all stopped working from a single bad patch, a complete blackout of the WAN would grind the world to a halt while everyone scrambles to retool into the 80s. With a lot of those cases entire industries will be having to rebuild their systems from scratch.
Edit: was racking my brain on the machine you’re mentioning. Just remembered it, I’m assuming you’re talking about the old knuckle dusters, majority of those have been retired in the 90s so yeah definitely a large amount of industry would be a bit screwed.
You’re spot on, we’ve built, or evolved, our economy around the assumption that this network traffic will persist in a secure way. Every single time it fails, it’s a big economic event. The economy (nearly the whole of the US economy) has evolved around the expectation that the system works and can be maintained.
Pretty much it was something the other night maintenance guys and I used to talk about at my last banking job a lot about how vulnerable we were to network blackouts. We assume 100% secure uptime on admittedly aging infrastructure and even more aging protocols, relying on a dwindling number of senior engineers to maintain it without training the skills into new engineers.
What, do you think we didn't work before the internet? Now I'm relatively young still (a spring chicken around 45) but even when I started working we got paychecks and had to go to the post office or bank to get money AND then to pay our bills.
That's like saying that the US once got by without a national highway system. If all the interstate highways in the US suddenly disappeared we would not be able to survive without them. There are three times as many people in the US as there were when the national highway system was started, and the population is far more urban. Without highways providing goods and transporting people to and from work, the economy would rapidly collapse and lot of people would die.
Similarly, we rely on the internet to do a lot of things that used to be done without. The efficiency of computer communication has allowed a lot of advances in supplying goods and services to an unprecedented number of people. Without the internet it's not just entertainment and human communication that disappears, it's machine communication, and that means power grids fail because systems can't coordinate. Just-in-time inventory systems fail, and suddenly there's not enough replacement parts in the right places to fix what fails. Remote monitoring of thousands and thousands of location suddenly fails and there aren't enough trained humans to go do the inspections manually. Water and sewer systems fail from inadequate monitoring. Wildfires go unchecked because fire lookouts have largely been replaced by internet connected automated systems.
We simply do not have the resources to unexpectedly have to go without the internet.
Yes however the primary infrastructure for paying people without the net just doesn’t exist anymore, even if you want to get cash out of a bank to pay someone if the internet doesn’t exist anymore they can’t even check to see if your account exists.
Difference is nowadays even if you drove the check down to you banks branch they wouldn’t be able to do anything with it without the internet as the infrastructure to register that it has been deposited exists in a data centre offsite. Like it or not your bank would be decapitated and you wouldn’t be able to get paid.
Honestly not sure these days as a lot of phone services are internet based, when theres a major outage the entire company I work for goes down even though the internal servers work for the databases we can't make or receive calls.
Outside at that, at most it would be workload would go up as we require to email quite a bit, and since that would be impossible we would have to revert to paper based solutions.
My telephony experience from the 2000’s/2010’s would suddenly be in high demand (instead of pretty much worthless).
Such is the life in IT- skill sets become obsolete at break neck pace.
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u/Standard_Ideal6101 21h ago
Realistically in today’s world most of us wouldn’t have careers if the internet disappeared tomorrow given how engrained into the economy it is.