- Download as many LLM models and the latest version of Ollama.app and all its dependencies.
- Make a list of my favorite music artists and torrent every album I can.
- Open my podcast app and download every starred episode (I have a ton of those that I listen to repeatedly).
- Torrent and libgen every tech book I value. Then, grab large collections of fiction EPUBs.
- Download every US Army field manual I can get my hands on, especially the Special Operations Medic manual, which is gold for civilian use in tough times.
- Download every radio frequency list I can for my area of the country.
- Download digital copies of The Encyclopedia of Country Living by Carla Emory, Where There Is No Doctor, and Where There Us No Dentist.
I already have paper versions of almost all of these but it’s handy to have easily-reproducible and far more portable digital copies.
It’s pretty amazing that we’re almost at the point where a single laptop computer with no internet connection can contain (1) most of humanity’s recorded knowledge and (2) an intelligence that can explain it to you.
It's very far from all the humanity's accumulated knowledge. Wikipedia is but a digest of of the deeper end of science, and barely scratches the applied sciences that are required for the modern advanced technology.
To preserve a copy of the humanity's recorded knowledge, you'd have to keep a copy of the library of Congress + archives of all scientific journals + arxiv.org, and equivalents of it for other languages, like Chinese, Japanese, German, French, Russian, Spanish, Hindi,.. Then there is a ton of proprietary and sometimes secret information held by companies and crucial for their functioning.
.. and to maximize profit, make it live-updateable and subscription-based. And don't forget periodic online license checks which are mandatory for app to run.
Bring back some old school methods with a modern twist too - upload all your contacts.
Instead of just emailing everyone inviting them to join and telling them which kind friend reccomended they join - use the birthday and home address information and send them real tangible marketing material for their birthday (+ on Anniversaries, Christmas, Easter and on any day ending with a "y").
A lot of historical information on the Internet only scrape the top 50% of the knowledge on niche subjects, if even that. So often I see forum requests along the lines of "can someone scan page 242 of book X please".
It would be very interesting to package this as a machine to be deployed into the field without any supporting tech infrastructure. Picture an epoxy cube with a connection for a speaker, a microphone and power. And maybe a serial port. There’s no network connection because it’s designed to be off the grid and last for decades
Good to know. I'm trying to dig up direct links to those USDA guides.
I mostly value the Encyclopedia of Country Living for it's old world skills (canning, food preservation, etc), but I'm fortunate also to live in a rural area with a lot of farmers and I have ready access to relatives and friends who are well-versed in those old world skills and they've been happy to teach them to me.
Best resource are the people who lived it. My grandfather was 102 when he passed and (when I could get him to stop talking about world war 2 for five minutes) filled in a lot of blanks for me in old time food storage.
My number one piece of advice for people learning this stuff: Nursing home activity staff know who the residents are who grew up on farms and in the country and are DESPERATE for volunteers. Go to a home and ask to spend time with those residents. That's what I do. It's how I learned most of the wild craft skills I have. The residents love it, it helps the community, and you learn.
- PDFs of the Black and Deck Guides to Home (repair/plumbing/carpentry/etc). Available for purchase/torrenting. Available on torrent sites. Not always up to code or best practice, but good enough to get you going and explain how the parts of your house's systems work.
<1 TB. I try to keep the entirety of my important files in under 1tb and so far, I have succeeded. Somehow I've managed to do this even with my photo/video iCloud Photo library. I am not counting large hoards like my ISO and movie collections.
I'm not really sure of exact sizes, but books and PDFs don't take up much space at all. I'd guess a few hundred megabytes? Wikipedia is ~20gb, IIRC.
Physically, I have paper copies of books stashed all over the place. It consumes a decent amount of space all together (~ 4 feet by 9 feet ~18 inches in volume)
yandex (search engine) is pretty good to find stuff. Just search for "band/film + torrent" and it almost always works for me. It's my way to go for lesser known works.
Files and folders on my MacBook and backed up to multiple places (3-2-1). My data store isn't more than 1tb (this doesn't count commercial movies, which sit on a NAS and I could take or leave those).
Having recently had a week long internet outage I can say quite confidently, nothing really.
The things that caused me massive anxiety during that outage was things that are real time.
No communication, since all my communication is through VOIP services of some sort, even mobile calls might be down depending on how you define internet.
And no banking at all, my bank doesn't even have physical branches and most banks in my country have gone that way, even going to a physical branch for one of the larger incumbent banks they just put you on a call with their call center, they cannot help you locally. The tellers and just fancy ATMs and they charge you a premium to use them instead of the ATM outside. If you thing that wont be an issue, well the internet is down, that local branch is useless.
There's still many cash based business so that's less of an issue for me but we will definitely have pandemic level panic again. I mean during the pandemic people bought all the toilet paper here, not the food but the toilet paper...
Online media will be the least of your problems and large swaths of that information is available and backed up at libraries around the world. Likewise if only the network is down the servers still exist so the data didn't go away.
Also if Y2K taught us anything is that we will solve the problem relatively quickly and even if what we currently know as the internet fails a different form of the internet will be back up soon enough.
It’s weird that we are in the minority (I guess I’m not shocked since this is HN). Very little on the Internet is useful for survival in an Internet down scenario. And if the Internet is gone, we must have far bigger problems. Libraries are going to be far more useful, and books don’t require electricity. I grew up in a place with lots of power outages and the main thing you are worried about is having hot water for a bath or a being able to cook a meal.
Tangential thought but we should probably work hard to preserve libraries in the future. Real ones, with books. They are really unmatched when it comes to longevity and safeguarding information in a way that computers cannot replicate.
I can't get behind these restricted whatif scenarios. If the internet were to disappear there would be ensuing outages of critical services and shortages of essential items very quickly. (In part because of the inevitable mass panic and hoarding).
If I knew the internet was going out tomorrow I wouldn't spend any time on the internet at all. I would go the grocery store, gas station, friends houses and then get as far from major cities as I could.
Thought experiments are a springboard for an area of thought, not necessarily a literal question to be answered. When someone asks you "what would you do with a billion dollars" responses like "but I don't have a billion dollars" or "nothing, I'd be investigating how I got it" completely miss the point. It's not about whether the scenario would realistically play out it's about setting the stage for certain types of thoughts without prescribing an exact question on everyone. Maybe you'll never realistically be at a train track with a fork in a road, 1 in the alternate path and 5 in the active path, with nothing more than the option to flick the switch and no other consideration to make... but it sets the stage for interesting thoughts to consider and talk about.
It can lead to much more varied and interesting discussion that direct questions, if you're willing to get over the non-literalness.
Information has outlived entire civilizations because of books. The key is the technology needed to decode and read it, which is just humans themselves. Either people still exist who can read and speak the language or closely related languages, and if not, we can hope to find something like a Rosetta stone or use statistical analysis that relies up on the commonality of all human languages.
Any digital storage device is simply giving you a bit stream. Being able to read the bits at all might rely upon technology that no longer exists. You need to know the layout of the medium, where to start reading, how to perform any built-in error correcting, what constitutes data versus metadata. Once you read the bits, you still need to do all of that again, but this time at the level of the filesystem. Then you need to do it a third time at the level of the file format. Then you get, at best, something like a consecutive sequence of unicode code points. Now you still need to know unicode.
We have no idea if these sorts of technologies will be remembered in 3,000 years, but given the history, there's a very good chance people will still be able to read Sanskrit and Latin, and the way the human eyeball accepts and decodes light waves will not change.
I think looking at history is a terrible way to make predictions about the future. The world will never again be anything close to what it was in the past.
While I think common digital media outlasting analog forms in terms of integrity over long periods of time is unrealistic I do have 40 year old CDs from 1984 that are still bit perfect as of just a couple years ago (verified against online checksum databases for the same releases), so it'll be interesting seeing how long they last.
Pressed CDs are pretty good in terms of durability, but how are you gonna get one produced in a single day? (Per the prompt, the Internet disappears tomorrow, not in a couple of weeks.)
There was a period of time where pressed CDs were manufactured poorly, with the aluminum layer inside exposed to the outside, resulting in corrosion over time and loss of readability on those CDs.
Overall, though, properly-made CDs, handled carefully, have been excellent at storing data long-term.
But while this is nice enough I guess for storing individual musical albums long-term, it's not practical for storing truly large volumes of arbitrary data. CD-Rs and CD-RWs have not had the same durability demonstrated at all (quite the opposite in fact). DVDs are better at almost 4GB per disc, but here again only the factory ones are actually durable, and 4GB isn't going to store much these days, perhaps one movie with high lossy compression.
While my comment wasn't about the feasibility of pressed CDs for a mass blackout event but just an example of long-term integrity of existing digital media, it's unfortunate that a forum (MyCE) dedicated to tracking integrity of user-writable optical discs unexpectedly closed a couple years ago due to the webmaster pulling the plug.
It had users who carefully performed benchmarks on media for more than a decade to see which types and makes held up best over time, along with best practices. Few have the interest or patience for such things so it's unfortunate to just have such info vanish.
I will add though that what's missing from the discussion is Blu-Ray, which allows up to 128GB per disc. (I only vaguely recall reading some critique of BD DL discs so can't say how it might compare long term though, apart from the greater cost at such capacities.)
Somehow it seems ironic that a forum dedicated to understanding the long-term viability of data storage, an important topic lately because of the unreliability of
3rd-party providers (like cloud companies), itself became a victim of the unreliability of its own webmaster.
128GB BD-R discs do exist, but at $219 on Amazon for 25 discs, that's about $0.07/GB. It would be MUCH cheaper to just buy a stack of refurbished enterprise-class HDDs and store your data on those, in triplicate, with a filesystem that has error correction (like ZFS). Personally, I would bet on HDDs used this way still being readable and not having bit-rot after 50 years over 4-layer BD-R discs.
Wouldn't it be more like $0.07/GB for BDXL? If one got particularly lucky with HDD failure rates perhaps they'd survive running that long in RAID but one would expect some replacements over such a long period.
Some other things to consider are at high capacities all HDDs use helium now, which slowly leaks (WD/HGST have a SMART stat about the level*) and the cost of running drives/associated computers/maintenance over a long span vs the up front cost of passive writable media (edit: for some reason I assumed this was what was meant but they could be left cold which would likely increase survival odds and be cheaper).
* And there isn't much long term data about it that I could find, though some have reported between 1-5 years the SMART stat either remaining at max or dropping a few digits. Even Backblaze outside of their first article a year into using them hasn't seemingly continued reporting on the stat that I've noticed. I get the sense though that other types of failures are expected sooner than leaks.
Whoops, thanks for pointing out the math error; I've fixed it.
>If one got particularly lucky with HDD failure rates perhaps they'd survive running that long in RAID but one would expect some replacements over such a long period.
I don't think so: I'm not talking about keeping these drives spinning for 50 years, but rather in cold storage, just as we'd do with the BDXL discs.
>Some other things to consider are at high capacities all HDDs use helium now, which slowly leaks (WD/HGST have a SMART stat about the level*) and the cost of running drives/associated computers/maintenance over a long span vs the up front cost of passive writable media.
Helium leakage is an issue I didn't think of, and I don't know how sitting in cold storage for 50 years would affect this. But again, the costs of running drives/maintenance/etc. should be zero, because I'm comparing apples to apples. No one would seriously propose a massive array of BDXL drives with BDXL discs continuously available, so likewise I'm proposing just keeping 10+TB HDDs in cold storage.
> There are those CDs made out of rock, but they have never veen proven to pass the test of time.
You're saying that something that has existed for less than 50 years doesn't count because we haven't been able to actually test it for more than 50 years, even though we understand the physics behind it and can theoretically predict how long it will last...
As for ubiquitous access, store a reading device or instructions on how to build one along with the data. If you're unable to do that, then I doubt you would be able to keep a massive library of books around for very long either.
There's also no financial incentive to build technologies like this. If the world actually got together and tried to build long-term digital storage then I'm sure we could come up with something even better.
An interesting technology, but also not exactly something I could get at my local Best Buy today.
M-DISC, assuming it's writable using consumer Blu-Ray writers, is promising though – Blu-Ray drives can probably still considered ubiquitous enough in a pinch.
> DNA storage
DNA is in fact extremely unstable unless it's part of living organisms that constantly error-correct and replicate it, and even then you have random mutations.
AFAIK a library doesn't really require maintenance, unless there are extreme weather conditions, the books will survive for a long time on their own. It's only the ancient books that require a controlled environment, because they already lasted for centuries and we're trying to have them last for even more due to their historical value. So you would be able to keep libraries around for long in many (most?) scenarios. Instead, the devices you need to read those storage media require high-tech factories to be manufactured. Just having the instructions to build one will not suffice.
How long? I don't think a library would last more than 100,000 years given natural disasters and plate tectonics etc. All you need to do is make a reading device that can last for a similar amount of time. And if the device itself wouldn't last that long then you could provide as much long-lasting equipment or material as possible to help build it.
The scenario you're describing is incredibly specific. It requires a post-apocalyptic world where humans have survived, but have somehow completely lost all ability to access past knowledge. Civilization must be advanced enough to access and read a library that has been shielded from the elements for millennia, but not advanced enough to build microscopes or lasers, even when given precise instructions on how to do so. It must be far enough into the future that any possible small high-tech reading device we could create is unlikely to have survived, but not so far into the future that a very large library structure is likely to have collapsed.
> I don't think a library would last more than 100,000 years given natural disasters and plate tectonics etc.
100000 years is a very long time. And in that time, you have good chances of reeboting civilization and reconstructing our current industrial world.
> All you need to do is make a reading device that can last for a similar amount of time
Easier said than done, and why would you need to do it, if libraries already solve the problem?
BTW I think we're considering two different scenarios. Libraries are excellent at solving the scenario given here, i.e. the internet collapses tomorrow.
There are many, many libraries that have sections that have an almost military-level protection (protected atmosphere, security, and so on) I think humanity has done a good job in general on this front
Yeah, and where exactly are those libraries? Are they in safe places that won't be obliterated if a war breaks out? I don't think so; they're mostly in the most likely to be targeted locations.
If humans were serious about protecting knowledge, they'd put these libraries on Svalbard or in Antarctica, or better yet in a lava tube on the Moon.
Agree. If we could time-travel back to 1985 then fine, I would miss very little about the modern internet.
If the internet were to just suddenly "go down" globally it would of course be a disaster and result in much unrest, panic, supply chain breakdowns, and general collapse of society. It it so interwoven into everything we depend on.
the real horror would be if it were to happen in 20 years or so, if it were to happen in the near future we still have people around who remember how things were done before computers.
society would end. some bumpy roads, sure, but we did very well before the internet and we’d do fine without it. we would just rebuild.
it’s just not as instrumental as some people make it out to be. nice? absofuckinlutely. necessary? nopes.
I have an interest in historical television, and YouTube has become the default location for other collectors to upload rips of VHS tapes and other formats of captured broadcasts.
So a few years ago I started up a server that slowly (so as not to annoy any YouTube rate limits) downloaded copies of every video from channels I enjoy. I also threw in a few "normal" YouTube channels that I just happen to like.
Today it's archived over 7500 videos and it's still rolling along.
I usually buy from ServerPartDeals and goHardDrive. I missed out on a really great refurb sale of 12TB Seagate drives that were $74.99 each, but even now, you can find 12TB disks for $89.99.
My only problem with LTO5 tapes is the amount required to do backup. Were I going to do LTO, I'd have to go with LTO9 since they hold 18/45TB and are around $90 a tape.
$74.99 for 12TB is still twice as expensive as the LTO 5 tapes I'm getting on ebay. The LTO drive was pretty cheap too, so I'm still way ahead in my 200TB archive with regards to price. The other thing I like about tape is that is has a physical write-protect notch, so if my systems were infected with some ransomware, it wouldn't be able to touch my tapes even if I have a tape in the drive. Plug a hard drive in and you could be instantly fucked by the ransomware.
I'm not sure how much write-protection would be useful in practice. If you're restoring from backups after a malware infection, you wouldn't directly restore on the infected system. You would first reinstall the OS/restore some earlier snapshot and then restore the data.
The point is you may not know a system is infected. There's more use cases for storing data on tape than only making backups. We clear data off spinning disks that we aren't actively working on. When we need it again, we get it from the tape. With a hard drive, you plug it in and the compromised system can infect the hard drive without you knowing. The malware doesn't have to actively destroy things for it to be a problem, it can take action at a later date, so with hard drives they can be a problem even when you don't know you've been compromised, and even after you've fixed the compromise if you've ever plugged in that hard drive while you were compromised. There is no write-protect on a hard drive that I know of. Tapes even come in "WORM" variety which is write-once, once you write data to the tape it can't be changed or erased.
Thanks for the explanation,I didn't consider this other use case. There are some ways of making a SATA connection read-only [0], but surely not as convenient as flipping a switch on a tape.
Of course tape can't be beat, always great for offline / offsite archival. I was talking about more ergonomic online archiving without including tape robots ;) Even if price per spinning TB didn't fall much since the pandemic started - IIRC I couldn't have bought a 20TB prosumer disk new for ~$300 then.
For "Hot" backup I have two mirrored RAID 10 systems (one in a detached garage, so technically "off site"), so I could lose up to 4 drives without losing any data. That's where the cheap hard drive storage comes in handy. One of those systems runs 24/7, so I pay a premium for spinning disks because availability is what that's all about. The "off site" system kind of a cold-storage backup system with the LTO tape drive in it. That system does weekly backups, and it also acts like a buffer for all the less "hot" data that mostly goes almost straight to tape until it's needed again.
I waited for years for used datacenter tape drives to become affordable. The math for DVD or hard drive cold storage didn't make sense, especially since I like redundant backups so it's 2x the cost. Tapes were designed for cold storage and it's faster and more cost effective than backing up to hard drives. Maybe I'll change my tune someday after a tape unravelling disaster if that ever happens, but in 2 years it's been pretty reliable.
Hard drives don't require an ultra-expensive tape drive to use, plus a computer somehow capable of actually holding and connecting to that drive. From what I read, you can't even connect one of these things to a normal computer: they have SAS interfaces, so you need a computer with a SAS HBA just to install the thing, and you only find those on server-grade hardware. You're not going to plug one of these things into your laptop.
A typical SATA HDD, by contrast, can be connected to any common consumer-grade motherboard, or you can just get a USB HDD dock if you really need to.
>Hard drives don't require an ultra-expensive tape drive to use
I bought an LTO 5 tape drive for $150. Do you really think that's "ultra expensive"? I do not. In fact I purchased 3 more LTO 5 drives for another $150 (I got lucky on that deal). These are all used datacenter hardware, tons of them on eBay now. The price is really not what you might be thinking it is.
> plus a computer somehow capable of actually holding and connecting to that drive
I have lots of computers, my backup computer is an old server of mine which is still very capable. It's just an old i5 computer, gaming motherboard, 16GB RAM but it can sustain 140MB/s write speed to the tapes. Good luck getting that sustained write speed on a refurb hard drive.
>they have SAS interfaces, so you need a computer with a SAS HBA just to install the thing
Yes, it cost me a total of $30, again from eBay. Not too expensive at all. I have purchased about 6 SAS cards from eBay for various computers (I have 3 RAID10 setups), none have failed, all have been very reliable, and they are all very inexpensive and easy to install.
> and you only find those on server-grade hardware.
You find them all over eBay for cheap. I installed these SAS cards in "gaming" motherboards. No, you do not need specialized "server-grade hardware" to install them into.
>You're not going to plug one of these things into your laptop.
Duh, laptops are for portability. If all you have is one single laptop you probably aren't doing anything serious anyway, and likely have no need for massive amounts of storage. I have desktops, servers, and laptops, and I use them all appropriately.
>A typical SATA HDD, by contrast, can be connected to any common consumer-grade motherboard, or you can just get a USB HDD dock if you really need to.
That's great, but it's still 2x more expensive per TB to hoard hundreds of TB of data. And hard drives do not have a write-protect notch, so as soon as you connect any hard drive to a compromised computer (whether you know it's compromised or not) you compromise the backup too.
Tapes were made for off-line long-term storage, hard drives were not. I have plenty of hard drives, but I know what they are for and I use them appropriately. I also know what tapes are for, and my life as a datahoarder has been far better (and more affordable) since I got the tape drives.
>I bought an LTO 5 tape drive for $150. Do you really think that's "ultra expensive"? I do not.
I do, because that's a BS price. I just looked on Ebay, and while there's a bunch of LTO-5 drives for somewhere around that price, they're all broken, "parts only". Actual working drives are much, much more expensive. $500 or more for just a drive isn't cheap.
I went through this already. Lived through a category 5 hurricane that took out the power grid, and antennas (among many other key infrastructure).
I downloaded as much documentation about the technology I relied on as possible. Ma pages, cloning repos, saving websites as HTML, etc. My goal was to have everything I needed in case I had to build my own internet again. Even if it was like cubas version that uses thumb drive based networking.
It worked for the most part. The one downside was having to ration my electricity usage as it was generated by a generator and fuel was not easy to come by.
This taught me that any kind of network requires a robust electrical grid. So, I’d install solar panels with batteries, a backup generator, some wind turbines, and then work on downloading all the documentation needed to make the network work.
I used to travel across the US a lot. On my laptop I started keeping websites, documentation, base container images, source code for Linux, tools I used, and languages I was programming in for references the languages I was using. This wasn't for emergencies, it was so I could work productively while in transit. (I also tuned the hell out of the Linux power settings on my Lenovo)
I hardly travel anymore but still wind up using all of those local resources. It's zero web searches, next to no latency, and I have the structure memorized. Finding information I need is so fast.
I wish it was more popular to have a local-first mindset when writing software.
The latest Lenovo P14s I have running Arch/sway has a crazy long battery life as well. It idles at 3.4W with wifi on. Writing code with an editor and all the fancy LSPS/plugins pushes me to 4W. I can get more than a full days worth of work on a single charge if I'm not doing anything compute heavy.
It's a Intel(R) Core(TM) Ultra 7 155H. And as far as power is concerned, spending some time fiddling with tlp will get you a good chunk of the way there. Playing around with different DEs will give different results. Sway is my preference, it's my favorite and has the lowest power footprint. Blacklisting drivers, tuning sysctls and hardware helps as well.
I'm almost never CPU constrained, so I tend to have everything idled down as much as possible.
Edit: and just for context, opening firefox and browsing the web right now has me at 9W.
At the time (2017), I was using an intel 2012 MacBook. Battery life was fine. The biggest challenge was not having a useful local search engine. It has prompted me to download lots of models and run them with ollama. I create local knowledge bases. This greatly augments the strategy.
If globally internet goes does tomorrow the only thing we need to preserve is Networking For Dummies book. In exactly seven days we would have local networks restored with all the content imaginable travelling through gigabit channels between peers.
If all computers go down and all cables burn to ashes simultaneously then it's maybe a good idea to preserve RISC-V For Dummies and Cable-making For Dummies as well.
It's funny that in times with "two big cisco core routers with hand written config" system were way more stable compared to now when everything is documented and built by "best practices".
Apologies, but this strikes me as a rather silly question. What I would keep in the event of a prolonged network outage would be of minimal significance.
What I'd really be concerned about would be our modern society. Purchasing food, water, fuel, clothes and other necessities would be near impossible. Supply chains would not just have problems, but literally fall apart. Money would stop moving.
If anything is "too big to fail" it would be the internet.
You're not wrong. If the internet fails for everyone (at least at the city level) then basically there's no banking.
Along with no banking there's no way to order supplies. No way to accept delivery. The very least of your problems is music or Wikipedia.
And I know you're thinking cash will help you, but its not enough. We used to have forests of paper and squadrons of clerks- that simply doesn't exist anymore.
I think that there is a lot of merit to your argument. However, I think there is also the human factor as well as a malleable technology factor. I'll speak to the second factor.
While we don't have forests of paper, we have pocket-sized computers that can talk peer to peer and store practically infinite amounts of transactions.
We don't have squadrons of clerks but we have software that can collate transactions locally.
The internet is certainly a useful tool for quick connectivity but there are definitely ways to do things without the internet and without reverting all the way back to cash/check and paper ledgers.
You will be unable to communicate except through face to face meetings. There is no more POTS(plain old telephone system), the entire world routes phone calls over the internet. There's no IM, the physical mail system will at least become dramatically backlogged if not fail entirely due to infrastructure failure internally and the new increased demand.
In my country is it not just that there isn't a POTS system, there isn't even copper. You have a FTTH(fiber to the home) link or a mobile connection. To my knowledge even in the US fiber terminates at the distribution point and your cable supply is last mile only.
I don't know what even will cause a global internet outage at the scale but it will be global panic.
> I don't know what even will cause a global internet outage at the scale but it will be global panic.
A coordinated attack on key infrastructure (eg: root DNS servers) could do it. Much of the internet is held together with duct tape and bubble gum. The reason it stays alive is because there are a lot of duct tape and bubble gum specialists :)
There are still a lot of ways to communicate without the internet over large distances (eg: radio, satellite, plane, drone, etc...) and there are different considerations/requirements for them. They are still an ultimate backup to the world we have created but shopping on Amazon via ham-radio would be quite painful!
The problem wouldn’t be a lack of alternative means to facilitate transactions, it would be a lack of trusted counterparties to transact with.
Grocery stores and bars used to let local trusted customers pay their accumulated purchases once per week or month, or accept personal checks from them without any means of verifying whether they were covered.
Today? It’s essentially cash or credit card, and no more mechanisms for local/decentralized credit decisions whatsoever, even if a checkout clerk might personally know a customer.
Because of ubiquitous connectivity, we have greatly increased, but also centralized trust. Local trust isn’t restored quickly, especially during an emergency when tensions are high anyway.
There are digital forms of currency already but barring that, you can still manage centralized trust with distributed communication.
Ie: maybe I trust a mechanism by Google/Apple where tap becomes powered locally and the phone/device itself carries a balance.
It’s true that these solutions don’t exist today but they are not far away with the amount of pressure we are talking about by losing the internet.
Also, credit cards used to work in a similar way to checks. The information would be recorded and the transaction would be finalized later.
I came across a pre-magnetic-strip credit card years ago… it’s pretty fascinating how currency has evolved in the last half-century. There is no reason for me to think that it will stop where we are at today.
> Ie: maybe I trust a mechanism by Google/Apple where tap becomes powered locally and the phone/device itself carries a balance.
That's something I'd definitely love to see, but it doesn't exist at the moment (in the US, at least; in Japan, there are stored-value cards in Apple Wallet that can support two-side offline transactions).
> Also, credit cards used to work in a similar way to checks. The information would be recorded and the transaction would be finalized later.
They used to, but they don't anymore. Almost all terminals and many cards won't let you do an offline transaction these days, for both credit and debit cards.
> it’s pretty fascinating how currency has evolved in the last half-century. There is no reason for me to think that it will stop where we are at today.
True, but unfortunately as far as I can see, it's all been moving towards a more centralized/connection-dependent system. That's great for when everything is working as expected, but raises some concerns about resilience.
i like that you speak towards humans not being hopeless without the internet. its true. they depend on it a lot, but can easily adapt..
i do beleive though that it would be only a temporary thing.
on a local level you can likely still enable a lot of stuff. the internet would most likely die due to a decision to disable it rather than mass equipment failure. also very unlikely, as a ton of people must disable it at the same time, knowing all full well the result of doing so...
if they do that so u can try to get a radio broadcast up with some equipment thats strapped to houses and appartment buildings eveywhere these days. see if some antennas can be enabled for telephony locally etc. get the spark going for getting a network back up. for isp equipment the same. you can enable and if needed reprogram/configure a lot of field equipment and enable local networks. perhaps depending on your locality even more (internet exchange and isp data centers are close to some people atleast).
quite sure it would be up and running again in no time locally. at some point networks would merge and an internet would form again...
all in all there's really not a lot anyone can do about it if people want to use these existing networks and equipment. unless they start cutting power to very large areas etc. etc., remove the equipment everywhere, or ourposefuly destroy it... - this line of thought is extremely unrealistic.
> While we don't have forests of paper, we have pocket-sized computers that can talk peer to peer and store practically infinite amounts of transactions.
And how do we know that someone's pocket computer doesn't contain a
forged list of transactions that never happened, or is missing some
transactions that did happen?
My autocomplete and documentation work offline. Not being able to download new libraries would suck, but as long as you have the necessary tools installed it wouldn't be too bad.
It's not that long ago that software was distributed on CD and tutorials in printed books. The internet adds a lot of convenience and productivity, but it's hardly a requirement.
The entire open source ecosystem will be gone. Distribution on CD (or USB sticks) would be okay for delivering software, but not viable for frequently exchanging patches among a large group of developers in different parts of the world.
Most open source projects are the work of one developer with occasional outside contributions. Those can still be distributed by CD or USB stick, either directly by mail or the more traditional route of magazines having CDs with collections of software their subscribers might like. Or a modern version of people meeting up to exchange files peer-to-peer. If you want to contribute, write a patch and send it back to the developer, e.g. by snail mail.
Large open source projects would be much more difficult. Though some of them are already either largely done by one company (so people can meet in person) or very hierarchical (like Linux).
To be honest, I would expect most small open source projects to just vanish, because of the lack of discoverability. The users won't be able to test them easily, and probably won't be paying for the shipping of a tiny tool that they have not yet tried and don't know whether it's useful or not.
Large open source projects can survive, but I'd imagine it will lean much more towards being developed mainly singular organizations. Without the internet, we don't just lose contributors, but also a lot of testers. The feedback loop will probably shrink, such that the software is mainly based on the need of the organization itself, and the perhaps a selected few collaborators who are very involved.
For sure food, water and etc are going to be the hardest to acquire. I live in Valencia which just had some massive flooding. The city of Valencia itself survived unscathed since they rerouted the river here in 1954, but the outskirts are completely devastated. The grocery stores in the city have more or less been empty across the entire city for the last week. Supplies are still getting in, but the slight increase in demand (all the people in the affected areas need to come into the city for groceries) along with panic buying make me realize in a true SHTF situation that we'd be completely screwed.
My most likely "internet down" scenario would be my local government deciding to launch a national firewall, probably under the guise of "combatting disinformation, malinformation, misinformation, and foreign interference".
For that scenario I need as many VPNs as possible, a VPS in a friendly jurisdiction, and a TOR browser.
If the "internet is down" for "good", it's hard to me to think of a scenario where it didn't bring down the rest of civilization down along with it.
In the U.K. a Thames barrier failure would (amongst a lot of London) wipe out the vast majority of switching capacity. Sure there’s slough and a few smaller IXPs but not enough for the capacity.
A few years ago I was concerned of this being a genuine possibility (at least for a few months) due to regional conflicts, so I prepared the following on some SD cards and flash drives:
* Offline copies of Wikipedia, Stack Overflow and some others using Kiwix
* Arch Linux iso and mirror of some packages for installing a new system
* Godot Engine along with game assets shamefully stolen from hl2, so I can have some creative outlet, or make training sims if things got so bad
* Hours of videos and songs I like
Today I would probably include Llama or other LLMs.
It's unfortunate to see big companies pushing for an online-only world. Windows 11 requiring Internet access to install, YouTube restricting yt-dlp and YouTube Premium downloaded videos only being playable if the app was able to ping YouTube servers in the past few days. It really feels like technology is regressing, we are creating new problems for ourselves for no good reason. But I guess it's fine when all of the company offices are in rich Western countries with fast and stable internet access.
I agree with you, and it's not only about rich and Western countries: you might be rich and have a stable Internet connection, but would like to stay totally offline too, which is very hard (if you just want to watch YT videos on something when offline etc) nowadays.
Does your Wikipedia mirror include media? Text-only wiki seems a bit bleak to me, but including all media would devour so much storage, I just haven't been able to justify using that much of my limited storage space
For authors of scholarly journal papers at least, I don't think piracy is remotely a concern, because they do not receive any compensation from subscriptions or purchases of their papers, whereas they do benefit from the increased readership of their works.
I am an author, and I don't think I'm entitled to have my work protected for 90+ years. Also, "piracy" is inevitable so the assumption is built-in my strategy.
If it does, then the author is sadly misguided and got convinced of someone that isn't true.
The people that download the book from these sites would never have bought them. Having your book downloaded by 10k people doesn't mean you've lost 10k sales, what it does mean is that you've got up to 10k people that wouldn't have bought the book anyway talking about it, effectively becoming word of mouth advertisers.
This isn't quiet as true for movies/tv series etc, because their value (entertainment time/price) is so much lower. Books on the other have usually cost $5-30 and will take 4-30 hours to read through. At that price point, very very few people will download the books to save what amounts to a single meal. Especially if you consider that so few people actually read several books per year (that's essentially $<30 per year "saved" via illegal downloads)
It could become an issue if a for-profit company could serve them legally however, I agree with that. It's hard to really talk about that, though ... It's a pure what-if/speculation after all
How many of those 10k purchases didn’t buy it because it was available for free somewhere? The point is, as you said, you don’t know.. However we do know the opposite is true, once Napster went away people started paying for Pandora. Netflix password crackdown lead to increased subscriptions.
When your desirable product isn’t available for free, people will trend towards buying it.
You're mistakenly throwing books and music into the same bag.
I often download books before buying them because I otherwise have no reasonable means to judge their content. This is not much different from flipping through the pages of a book in a library before buying it. The appeal of reading from an actual physical book is not something that any digital form can replace, so the book being available in digital form won't stop me from buying a copy. I also have no interest in Kindles and DRM.
Music, on the other hand, might be a different story except for select audiophiles who prefer vinyl.
So I don't think we can generalize to "product" like you do in your argument. Details and facts actually matter.
The science shows that piracy increases the amount people pay for content not the reverse.
Corey Doctorow has the right idea. <sic> “I give my works away for free. Every time I gain another fan I gain another person who might want to own the hardback of my new book.”
If your desirable product is available for free more people find you, like you, follow you, patronize you. A lot of those people have money and are happy to give it to you to support you continuing to make good work.
Your example is strange, as that was clearly a distribution problem. It's been well covered and could be observed with Netflix too, until they've reintroduced this issue.
This distribution problem doesn't really exist with books at the moment as Kindle exists.
At least for one of the websites in this lis, no it does not as you don't gain anything from the money that the users pay. And frankly some people will email you asking you to send them your work for free and you will happily do that.
thought experiment: if the internet were to go down tomorrow for an indefinite period, what content would you most want to download and preserve?
Music that I do not already have on CD. Videos that contain useful knowledge on DIY medical procedures, DIY home repair and assorted other DIY knowledge. I archive this stuff already. That's about it really. I try to avoid any dependency on the internet or smart phones given the commercial internet did not exist for a big part of my life.
I'm surprised nobody said "porn" given how much traffic those sites drive -- is offline porn still easy to find? Last time I looked for offline porn, it was at the local video rental store in the back room section that said "Adults only", but now those stores are long gone.
Are those "Lingerie and Adult Toys" stores on the outskirts of town filled with DVD's and magazines?
As mentioned on another comment, yt-dlp works, Depending on how deep you want to go, there's a lot to grab
Telegram, Discord and assorted communities do a lot for keeping some semblance of "stashing" alive
Also there's Whisparr
The "weird" part of it (And why I believe a lot of people don't think about it at first) is the amount of forethought that this involves
"The algorithm" plays a significantly larger part on sites where it's considered a faux pas to have an account, and actively curating a collection is considered creepy, unlike with music
I don't think I saw OpenStreetMaps in the lists provided by various people in this thread. I rely on GPS a lot, and having a local one would help greatly (preferably on phone, but still).
Weren't it for the fact the current UI is intended more for debug and development (as opposed to Android and iOS versions), Organic Maps would be cool.
I produce books[1] for Standard Ebooks.[2] I’ve got a fifty-long list of books-to-do-at some point, so grabbing transcriptions from Gutenberg and scans from archive.org for each would keep me busy for a long time, presumably long enough for the internet to heal whatever state it’s got itself into.
Having produced only a single book for standardebooks, I don't think many people appreciate the amount of effort that goes into the corrections, semantic html additions, and other edits it takes to go from a typical Gutenberg file to a standardebooks release. Granted, the tool chain you guys have created is great and is immensely helpful.
All that to mainly say..I appreciate you. It's one of my favorite projects, and I hope it keeps going strong indefinitely.
Music and movies that are important to me that I only access via streaming. Maybe a few TV shows in SD.
A giant bundle of ebooks is I can find one (e.g., in a public torrent).
Open-source ecology.
-----
The things I'd really want archived but that there probably wouldn't be time to archive in such a short period without already having mostly-complete offline copies:
- Wikipedia (in all languages)
- Internet Archive
- GNU projects and docs
- Apache projects and docs
- Nix, Nixpkgs and docs
- as many books as possible regardless of source (e.g., LibGen)
- as much music as possible regardless of source
- everything public on GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, SourceHut, Codeberg
- all KDE source code and docs
- maybe video content (in SD only) based on some coarse filter like whether a movie is in the Library of Congress
- maybe archives of some popular forums and forum platforms like Reddit, StackOverflow, important Discourse instances
- various protocols and standards docs?
It would be just the global internet? What would want to have in our local (continent, country, city, home, etc) internet provided that I have enough resources? The balkanization of Internet is still in the menu.
Or it may be some global event disabling all computers, like a cosmic EMP?
There are several “easy” things to download and have usable somehow. Wikipedia used to have available as download copy of the database. Google still have takeout for all my things that it have stored. A lot of the public code in GitHub or other public repositories are easy to download.
4chan, reddit, and HN because they were humanity's only honest repositories. linkedin might be useful as our species' first attempt to create a simulation and to generate a a set of things people in an economy do.
we could probably rebuild civilization just from 3blue1brown.
I love 3b1b as much as the next guy, but let's not overstate its meaningfulness.
It's definitely one of the best learning resources on the topics it covers, but I'd say the actual textbooks are a more valuable resource. After all his most timeless videos cover traditional calculus and linear algebra. Stuff you'd find explained in a more rigorous and confusing fashion in every tech undergrad curriculum.
Also I'd be more concerned with mechanical engineering over CNNs in times of rebuilding civilization.
The specific youtube channel Primitive Technology [1] definitely does not. John Plant does everything as you see, although he does have the benefit of doing research - he doesn't do things as people in the past have done, but as they might have done had they known things he does. But there's no tricks and no machinery. (And of course, some of what he's able to do is dependent on his environment - the plants he uses aren't around my part of the world.
But there are a lot of knock-off channels, which you're presumably referring to, where people build things that are basically mini-castles, and pools filled with water using a pipe network, etc. And those are definitely at least partially fake.
> 4han, reddit, and HN because they were humanity's only honest repositories
They are interesting, valuable records of humanity in the early 21st century, but they - and other social media - contain a higher volume of misinformation and disinformation than anything the world has seen, and I'd say a higher proportion than anything since (the Middle Ages? Hard to compare.). Think of the infinite conspiracy theories and just plain bad information on Reddit, for example.
they were the vox populi. a lot of it was garbage, but having a mental filter for it is what set a bar. humor is a more reliable signal for truth than official consensus any day. I think they captured something essential.
while you are probably sincere, when I hear terms like misinformation and disinformation these days I think, "tell me you have a received ontology without telling me you have a received ontology." that's how divided the discourse is. I'd save them because those sites were what people said when they felt they could express themselves honestly, and all gems are covered in muck, it just takes some digging and refinement.
> when I hear terms like misinformation and disinformation these days I think, "tell me you have a received ontology without telling me you have a received ontology."
I agree! That's the knee-jerk reaction from people caught up in the disinformation. There is truth, and we all have received ontologies - you've received yours from 4chan. The point of disinformation is not to persuade you about a lie, but to paralyze the public by taking away truth, discussion, consensus. You and I can't discuss any factual truth because of your ontology.
> what people said when they felt they could express themselves honestly
If they agreed with the 4chan (etc) received ontology. For example, what I wrote would get the same reaction you gave me, though much more aggressively and dismissively. People were only honest as far as it agreed with the ontology; beyond that they lied or went someplace else.
> humor is a more reliable signal for truth than official consensus any day
I'm not surprised to see that. IMHO it's nonsense rhetoric - means nothing, sounds good. Right from 4chan / reddit / etc.
> I think they captured something essential.
Agreed. They are special places, but not for any sort of factual truth.
It's actually an interesting exchange as from my perspective, the people who are worried about disinformation are what I would call totalitaritized, where the idea of many-truths and subjectivity is a proxy for there being no truth at all. not so much champagne socialists as more banal, pumpkin spice nihilists.
the difference between a natural and recieved ontology is like a received pronunciation, people use it because they were told to use it for in-group signaling, and not as the effect of competence, principle, or experience. the people who are affectedly concerned about disinformation aren't reasoning from base reality or experience, they are iterating a logic of ideas used for in-group signaling. one of those ideas equates criticism with competence.
a received ontology is an affect, whereas a natural ontology is an effect. a mind that can't tell the difference between effect and affect is not equipped to apprehend the consequences of experience or competence, or of an ontology derived from it. it operates on representations and believes others do because that's the depth of its own experience, its consciousness exists on a substrate of languge and material symbols navigated by criticism. in a word, godless.
the beauty of sites like reddit, 4chan, and related ones is that for all their astroturfing, they accumulate honesty that people managing a hegemonic narrative persona can't allow to exist. disinformation and conspiracy theories exist, but I would argue the perspective that problematizes them is just an in-group affectation.
> the people who are worried about disinformation are what I would call totalitaritized, where the idea of many-truths and subjectivity is a proxy for there being no truth at all. not so much champagne socialists as more banal, pumpkin spice nihilists.
Who will keep reading after you say something ignorant, offensive, and fabricated like this? Again, you seem to have learned the lesson of propaganda: Shut down discourse.
I do store and update backups of public information regularly, since losing access to much of the Internet completely is not such a remote possibility here; many resources are blocked already, both proxying services and protocols are being blocked as well. Storing those backups together with personal data backups.
The things I store are those that seem valuable and information-dense, the kinds that I would be able to use in a relatively prolonged isolation. Storage space is limited, and redundancy is important for backups, so more copies of important information are preferable, to some extent, over added less important information. That is, one may consider tiered backups.
Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg, perhaps as OpenZIM archives (for Kiwix, making them more readily accessible), look like good starting points, along with other Wikimedia projects (e.g., Wikisource, Wiktionary; also available as OpenZIM archives). A music collection is a part of my personal backups. Then there are textbooks: OpenStax provides good ones under the CC BY license, LibreTexts books are of variable quality, but also worthwhile to look into, while WikiBooks are mostly disappointing. Then one may consider copyright-infringing book libraries, if one is fine with those. A few hundred gibibytes seem sufficient for a decent stockpile, including a good chunk of human knowledge, and providing plenty to do alone (read and study, that is).
Textbooks could be much more lightweight if their sources (e.g., in LaTeX) were provided, rather than PDFs, but unfortunately even for those under permissive licenses, usually only PDFs are available, which hinders both printing (as another form of backups) and regular digital data storage.
I expect the government will block software repositories among the last ones, so not backing up those yet, but mirroring, say, Debian archive (including sources) may be a good idea for such a situation, or when preparing for the Internet to go down.
If one has a lot of extra storage available, other easily available large data dumps to consider are Common Crawl, arXiv bulk data downloads, complete OSM data, huge copyright-infringing libraries, and videos: plenty of nice YouTube channels and TV series.
More than downloading a bunch of information, I would also think about hoarding computers that might last a long time if taken care of... along with a durable power source that doesn't require fossil fuels. (eg: This potentially includes gasification based generators)
For the internet to "go down for an indefinite period" there would need to be some pretty big changes to our current world. The reason it "goes down" also matters a lot.
1) Political reasons (eg: whomever is in power wants to control information flow)
This will likely mean that certain kinds of information can still flow because we don't want to crash the entire economy.
In this case, I would want all of the information I could get my hands on about known history. This includes previous regimes and how they ultimately played out.
2) Geo-political (some other country bans your access to their resources)
This is a harder case to enforce without complete isolation ... but theoretically possible.
In this case, technical howtos are still useful as you can probably still get modern supplies. Depending on what my country produces, I would probably want to get all information about those processes as I could. Also, if my country doesn't produce a lot of food, information on what can be grown locally would be helpful... along with ways to protect it from nature.
3) Global catastrophe (plague/virus/nuclear winter/etc...)
Maybe enough of the internet is just "lost" and the technical means to resurrect it has also disappeared.
At this point, you need to think about being completely self-sufficient. ie: Grow your own food, make your own tools, protect yourself from animals and people. It would be helpful to have some tools at the start for this. Maybe even just basic gardening tools and a greenhouse ... and whatever form of protection makes the most sense to you. Find some land that can sustain you; Leftover city supplies will likely disappear very fast.
4) All of the above, simultaneously.
It's time to just get a Bible and start praying. Maybe a bunker, too. Survival will likely be a lot of luck and a lot of cunning.
Avoiding electrolytic caps is a good start for sure. There are plenty of boards out there without them.
Running CPUs and boards at lower power settings can also help. Thermal cycling is the enemy of longevity. Being able to control CPU frequency will be helpful.
Many power supplies have electrolytic caps in them as well. If you can stick to a standard that’s easy to find then there is a good chance you can just salvage an existing power supply that has managed to survive.
Some cheaper examples to consider would be raspberrypi boards with usb-c power. Don’t run them at full speed to reduce long-term thermal effects. About a decade ago I would have suggested Intel Atom based systems for similar reasons.
Server hardware is often made to a better spec for longevity. I miss old sparc hardware; I feel like those machines could last forever.
Today, arm based systems are probably a good bet since you can find lots of software for them and they run cooler than (say) x86 variants of similar caliber.
Storage is the next Achilles heel to consider. Cheap flash will die sooner rather than later. I’m not up on the best tech in this space anymore though so somebody else might chime in here.
Finally, displays can be pretty fragile. Phone displays actually come to mind as a decently ruggedized technology. Bigger displays are probably more prone to damage long-term so, small and durable is probably valuable here.
I’ll probably catch flak for this but… a smartphone is actually a pretty decent computer that can last a very long time. If you can run arbitrary software on it and keep it in one place instead of in your pocket, it could be a good get. The issue I know of here is the battery; if it gets too weak then some phones may not be able to power up completely even with a power supply attached.
a full copy of the slackware source code: fits in 10gb, contains a semi-curated set of applications and utilities for nearly any purpose, including their documentation, without trying to include everything. I throw this on any system I want to forget about, and I rarely need to add any additional software.
If the internet disappeared tomorrow, I’d save Alex Hormozi’s sales advice. His content on sales is like a survival kit—he emphasizes that mastering sales is a skill that keeps you secure no matter what. As they say, if you know how to sell, you’ll never go hungry.
If that's all you read, then I'd expect that you will find turmoil and create more. I'd read about the things humanity actually wants to do and benefits from.
I don't read How to write horrible code and what to do when that's your codebase. I do have to know the latter a bit, but no more than necessary.
This thread has an utmost importance among other few HN threads and I couldn't grasp why this hasn't gained much traction yet. Our focus should be developing tools that supports the sharing/communication of the people/repositories of information spread across multiple places and accessible (the very meaning of internet, since www days). Totally worth noting the internet is "Too big to fail" yet the purpose should not be diverging on how to not only restore but to connect when/if it fails to.
First thing that comes to mind is the entirety of 3blue1brown, it's brilliant.
I also like the opposite thought experiment, turns out I have so much of the Internet that I'd love to never come back online. The whole shitcoin scene, poof, gone.
There are a few categories here, ranked in rough order of how much I want them between and within categories, assuming infinite storage space and the ability to read the format that it's in.
Knowledge/Entertainment: A huge subset of LibGen/Anna's Archive. Wikipedia. Survival guides. Tons of websites, especially smaller ones that might not get preserved. I think the NYTimes will be fine, but random indie websites, not so much. Lots of music. Project Gutenberg and swaths of the Online Books Page listed items. Videos, and of course VLC (if it's not already downloaded). Various coding things (I, I assume unusually for HN, am not a programmer and don't know any programming languages, might as well learn to code.) Minecraft or a knockoff, on the off chance I somehow get bored.
Creating: LibreOffice (if it's not already installed). If it works offline, the Inspiral app, because spirographs make everything better. Gimp, Inkscape, Krita.
Personal: Records of as much of my digital life as I can get. So comments, posts, etc. I want to be able to look back at who I was.
Organization: Calibre (again, assuming it's not installed). Obsidian.
I won't contribute links to resouces, as in this thread there are many users that have listed everything I would have, plus more. I'll just recommend the Kiwix app[0], which is a convenient way of downloading many of the resources suggested by others, and keep those handy. That is, assuming you have a way of keeping your smartphone charged ;)
The physical addresses of data/code sources to use for sneakernet transfers while the internet is down.
It would also be nice to download the "card catalog" of the local library for offline use at home, if that was possible.
Truth is, "tomorrow" is not enough advance notice for me to save much. Need to be proactive, i.e., "What have I already preserved if the internet went down tomorrow".
If the Internet went down tomorrow, I'd finally have time to organize the 90,000+ .PDF files I have collected over 3 decades, of every single web article I've read and printed to .PDF for later reading/reference.
I'd probably write some tools to organize it all, and end up re-creating most of the good content of the sites I like to visit.
After this, I'd get to the 8 Terabyte NAS I've had tucked away, with all the crap I've ever downloaded since 1993. :P
I already downloaded collections of various ROMs for use in emulators along with the emulators to use them. These ROMs don't need the Internet and have no DRM in the emulators.
My Steam collection won't work because it needs the Internet and DRM to work.
I've used the emulator "Retroarch" on the Steam Deck and had good success playing with it in offline mode. It has a bit of a learning curve, but it's been a great fit for me
BibleHub.com, GotQuestions.org, and BiblicalTraining.org for spiritual truth.
Educational resources for training people in skills they’ll need. Everything from K-12 to eHow.
Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica to preserve our knowledge. Specialist ones like the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and Mayo Clinic, too.
Source code for major OSS like Linux, OpenOffice, etc. Hardware designs, too. Especially old-school stuff on primitive fabs or hand-wired. We’ll be covered both ways.
I think we can remake everything else from scratch using the prior lessons learned.
Enough to ensure I can get a basic homelab started and all the tech I need to deploy an LLM.
Imperfect as they are they’re an incredibly dense summary of the internet.
And then duplicate all the repos plus maybe a couple of those old school multi dvd Ubuntu editions intended for offline. Just in case I missed something like a dev essentials package. Copies of the top handful of python packages would also be grand
Chances of missing something crucial is sky high though so this would need a dry run
Well most of YouTube I can easily do without, but there are a lot of good demonstrations of crafts and repairs on there that are way easier to understand than a text explanation of the same thing. If "indefinite" means "it may be that society's ability to send you stuff and fix what you have goes away for a while", I would want an archive of a lot of that. But it's <1% of the YT content, so I'm not sure if there's a good way to filter for just that.
I really hope this is just a thought experiment and not a 'hint hint' by someone who knows more about what will happen in 2 days after the US 2024 presidential election.
We were discussing in my office today how there might be widespread protests about the election result soon.
Who knows how crazy people get, a few dedicated pissed people in a few key places could be quite disastrous.
My personal/work files for which the physical media of origin no longer exists. Source codes, mine and of others that I care about. Compilers. Lots of books and Wikipedia.
I have literally zero dependency on the Internet. Everything I value (family and event photos, music, books (hard copies), school report cards, ID cards, etc.) is already with me in hard copies or hard drive. If Internet were to go down, I believe, I will breathe happily!!
How much would it hurt if you lost all your family photos in one day?
And how much would a solution be worth to you?
That's why I have a consumer NAS at home where I backup all my most precious media. Simply because I've worked in IT for 20 years so I believe more in off-site backups than I do in the reliability of IT services.
I have a small folder for my important stuff, mirrored on on all my devices with SyncThing, backed up from my phone to Google with FolderSync, and from my laptop to the NAS with Kopia.
I really like the setup since it doesn't require a bunch of time investment, there's no custom scripts to set up or community packages to install.
Im case of a catastrophe, wouldn’t be better to rely on non-tech storage of information? Like books, for example? And if so, what printed books would be better for this purpose? Encyclopedias?
MSDN, I feel it would be a great time to finally do all the side projects I ever wanted, and lots of them are related to windows APIs :)
Not to save it for future generation, just for myself.
Also, a bunch of dev related git repos, such as zig, rust, microsft/stl, python
When I did this a number of years ago, and it was only around 5-6GB, or about 20GB with all the images. I also added about 4GB for windows, android, iOS, Linux, and Mac OS apps to parse/view the data. All of that fits on a 32GB flashdrive that I used to keep on my keychain but currently is in my glove compartment I think.
It sparks some amazement in me still to wrap my head around the reality of so much information in a thing the size of my pinky. Or the size of my pinky nail if you use a micro SD card. And yeah, just took a weekend of downloading and setting it up, and flashdrives/microsd cards are easily found at department stores, or even gas stations sometimes.
Even disregarded any potential doomsday utility, the amusement/amazement it's brought me was well worth the modest time/money it took. I hope more people give it a try
People talk about investing in physical gold for an economic meltdown, I think stacks of microSD cards with the full contents of Wikipedia and a Netflix archive is worth orders of magnitude more in the event of a catastrophe
Since everybody else would try to preserve what is really important, I would go for a random sample. So that future archeologists can form their own opinions about what this era was really about.
Archaeologists love middens (trash heaps) as they provide a cross section of stuff that a society used. I wonder what they will make of our landfills?
"All the objects we found in the domestic site 1357.# contain the same marking, "MAD EIN CHIN A". We have been unable to decode this but its presence on everything we found suggests that it was a prayer or mantra to a domestic god"
Honestly, I think we're at the point now where if the internet went down it'd cause a pretty heavy collapse of society. I'd be less worried about having stored content and more worried about not being able to access my money, businesses not being able to operate, friends and family being unable to communicate, being unable to travel back home, etc.
It'd eventually sort itself out to the ways pre-internet, sure - but so much now is built on internet-connected tech, not pre-internet tech.
I guess the hot tip is to dig out the O'Reilly UUCP and Netnews book, and see if any of the phone modems still work. MacOS still ships with uucico and uucp.
Mind, it probably wouldn't work for me, I have fiber to my house, no POTS. I dunno if the old 56K modems work or not.
as many AI models as i can get my hands on, to generate content for me
who knows how long the net goes down for, and if i try to just save what exists, it would run out after _some_ time (maybe not my time, but when unknown time horizons are probable, a generator > a pile, imo)
there's a plausible incentive where a generation of models gets trained up to provide what most people will want, and then destroying the "old" internet behind it to prevent things like regime-derailing memes to ever happen again.
If Internet go down, likely the electricity is out. So likely we need some power source first, maybe I'll get solar and batteries first. Then I'll get some doomsday movies / zombie movies :)
Save a frozen copy of current knowledge before the AI starts to corrupt every fact with very convincing fake data. Does not sound totally unreasonable.
I would double-check my offline backups of everything I care about (personal files and professional projects, as well as local copies of music and videos), be sure my local maps are up to date for directions, and perhaps grab new videos from a YouTube channels to have some new entertainment in case I wasn't able to get anything new for a while.
Otherwise, there's not much I'd want. Presumably my local library would still have books, and the radio would still carry news. Most of what I find valuable on the internet are things that refresh in near real-time like message boards and news, or aren't really data to be backed up so much as services I use like ordering food or checking my bank balance.
Having recently gone through over three weeks of power, internet, and cell service outage with Hurricane Helene, at no point was I tempted to go into town and download me some more internet for use offline.
Depends what “internet is down” means, but are you sure radio will carry news?
Even if the studio can get the signal out to a transmitter, how will news get to the studio? How will you be able to trust it? You might have someone saying something in a CB radio if you have one, but can you rely on that random person?
Having recently lived through a natural disaster, the radio carried local news, which was all I cared about at the time. (Transmission overall was harmed by storm damage, but the local station had direct access to at least a few of their towers.)
Whether I can rely on the information I get is a good point, but it seems like we as a society struggle with that just as much with the internet as without. Forced decentralization through broken connections may have played as much of a positive role in preserving the integrity of information as it was a negative.
Friendly reminder that the Internet Archive is accepting donations. In light of recent attacks causing operational issues for the archive, additional funding will likely be well spent:
Honestly, I wouldn’t mind. I would continue and live my life. I would ride public transportation to go to work, I would go to the library if I want to check something out, I would just be spontaneous instead of preplanning everything online or be influenced by opinions online.
Even simple things like this would be difficult. For starters, ticketing tends to be powered by 5G on buses and over physical networks for permanent fare gates like at a railway station.
Bus arrivals screens and boards at stations are also fed by the network.
I guess if we take a generous interpretation of the OP's question though, those would still be able to function assuming they work over a private network instead of the internet.
Absolutely none of it. I don't think we are markedly better off as a species because of it.
Yes we'd lose probably a good chunk of cultural artifacts but 99% of those are transient and will eventually be lost to the sands of time anyway (this is true for nearly every era).
Meanwhile the 'culture' downstream of the internet is vapid, self-centered, packed with rage and perversion, does little to stop human suffering or strife, and is essentially a wealth consolidation and mass surveillance tool for the gentry.
That said, I have done this prior to a combat deployment in a faraway land, I loaded a ton of books, wikipedia, and movies/TV shows up on an external harddrive.
I used it maybe twice and for non-critical stuff. It was eye-opening (and refreshing) how little me, my buddies, or the people we were working with cared about this nonsense, especially upon the realization that it had almost no bearing or impact on who we were or what we were doing.
I mean, it's not a practical answer to your question, but I'd love a backup of YouTube. I think it's probably got most of humanity's knowledge in there somewhere, in all kinds of forms for all kinds of levels.
Probably shelf stable food, firearms, hard currency like gold and silver. For information the books I already have (Classic literature, engineering references, cook books). Honestly, computers would be the last thing I care about even though it’s both my hobby and my career.
I say this because the Internet is so integral to our current society and way of life that it would be like losing access to electricity. Most young people have never lived in a world without Internet access. Electronic payments, logistics, food distribution, etc would all stop functioning. Society is far more fragile than anyone wants to admit and people would panic.
- All of Wikipedia English
- Download as many LLM models and the latest version of Ollama.app and all its dependencies.
- Make a list of my favorite music artists and torrent every album I can.
- Open my podcast app and download every starred episode (I have a ton of those that I listen to repeatedly).
- Torrent and libgen every tech book I value. Then, grab large collections of fiction EPUBs.
- Download every US Army field manual I can get my hands on, especially the Special Operations Medic manual, which is gold for civilian use in tough times.
- Download every radio frequency list I can for my area of the country.
- Download digital copies of The Encyclopedia of Country Living by Carla Emory, Where There Is No Doctor, and Where There Us No Dentist.
I already have paper versions of almost all of these but it’s handy to have easily-reproducible and far more portable digital copies.
To preserve a copy of the humanity's recorded knowledge, you'd have to keep a copy of the library of Congress + archives of all scientific journals + arxiv.org, and equivalents of it for other languages, like Chinese, Japanese, German, French, Russian, Spanish, Hindi,.. Then there is a ton of proprietary and sometimes secret information held by companies and crucial for their functioning.
replace education in places without electricity with survival in case of civilization end.
Choose some reasonably good llm model + corpus of data to enhance the generation (e.g. wikipedia).
Package it in a long-lasting battery, rough device. Think of a tablet/laptop you would take deep into the desert for a multi-week trip.
/s
Include a key logger and a daemon to grab full screenshots every few seconds.
Instead of just emailing everyone inviting them to join and telling them which kind friend reccomended they join - use the birthday and home address information and send them real tangible marketing material for their birthday (+ on Anniversaries, Christmas, Easter and on any day ending with a "y").
A lot of historical information on the Internet only scrape the top 50% of the knowledge on niche subjects, if even that. So often I see forum requests along the lines of "can someone scan page 242 of book X please".
Like, "explains it as well as a person who doesn't know anything about it but is reading the wikipedia page".
Like, "explains it but lies, and when you catch them at it, insists that they weren't lying".
Like, "can't actually do math, but has had heard lots of math problems so they guess and hope you don't check on them".
A sleazy marketer's idea of "explains it to you".
https://www.wired.com/2017/07/inside-cubas-diy-internet-revo...
For example, the saying where I live is an acre and a half for a cow and a calf. Where my folks live you need closer to 10 acres for the two animals.
The USDA has hyper local guides for native and garden plants and native and farmed animals. Mostly in PDF so they can be easily printed.
I mostly value the Encyclopedia of Country Living for it's old world skills (canning, food preservation, etc), but I'm fortunate also to live in a rural area with a lot of farmers and I have ready access to relatives and friends who are well-versed in those old world skills and they've been happy to teach them to me.
My number one piece of advice for people learning this stuff: Nursing home activity staff know who the residents are who grew up on farms and in the country and are DESPERATE for volunteers. Go to a home and ask to spend time with those residents. That's what I do. It's how I learned most of the wild craft skills I have. The residents love it, it helps the community, and you learn.
Your county extension probably has all the guides in print form for you, generally for free.
The farm animal and plant guides are in the resources for new farmers. They're buried and I can't find them back, but they're there.
- PDFs of the Black and Deck Guides to Home (repair/plumbing/carpentry/etc). Available for purchase/torrenting. Available on torrent sites. Not always up to code or best practice, but good enough to get you going and explain how the parts of your house's systems work.
It’s almost like going for a programming book from 1982 vs now. The state of the medical art has changed substantially for the better since 1982.
The newer post-2004-ish guides include substantial updates to field medical care techniques (especially WRT blood loss, eg gunshot wounds).
There are PDFs of the newer SOC guide on the net. I’ll try to find some good links when I get back near a computer.
I'm not really sure of exact sizes, but books and PDFs don't take up much space at all. I'd guess a few hundred megabytes? Wikipedia is ~20gb, IIRC.
Physically, I have paper copies of books stashed all over the place. It consumes a decent amount of space all together (~ 4 feet by 9 feet ~18 inches in volume)
idk if it applies to you, but single week of training will be worth 10 000 pages of pdf, when shtf you won't have time to read much
I recently purchased a Mac Studio with 128gb RAM for the sole purpose of being able to run 70b models at 8-bit quantization
Having recently had a week long internet outage I can say quite confidently, nothing really.
The things that caused me massive anxiety during that outage was things that are real time.
No communication, since all my communication is through VOIP services of some sort, even mobile calls might be down depending on how you define internet.
And no banking at all, my bank doesn't even have physical branches and most banks in my country have gone that way, even going to a physical branch for one of the larger incumbent banks they just put you on a call with their call center, they cannot help you locally. The tellers and just fancy ATMs and they charge you a premium to use them instead of the ATM outside. If you thing that wont be an issue, well the internet is down, that local branch is useless.
There's still many cash based business so that's less of an issue for me but we will definitely have pandemic level panic again. I mean during the pandemic people bought all the toilet paper here, not the food but the toilet paper...
Online media will be the least of your problems and large swaths of that information is available and backed up at libraries around the world. Likewise if only the network is down the servers still exist so the data didn't go away.
Also if Y2K taught us anything is that we will solve the problem relatively quickly and even if what we currently know as the internet fails a different form of the internet will be back up soon enough.
Tangential thought but we should probably work hard to preserve libraries in the future. Real ones, with books. They are really unmatched when it comes to longevity and safeguarding information in a way that computers cannot replicate.
If I knew the internet was going out tomorrow I wouldn't spend any time on the internet at all. I would go the grocery store, gas station, friends houses and then get as far from major cities as I could.
It can lead to much more varied and interesting discussion that direct questions, if you're willing to get over the non-literalness.
How so? There are long-term digital storage technologies that would long outlast any book and are many orders of magnitude denser.
If it's digital storage, you have to have electricity, a compatible device, an understanding of the storage, and software that can read it.
And, increasingly, DRM servers that will allow you to read it.
Any digital storage device is simply giving you a bit stream. Being able to read the bits at all might rely upon technology that no longer exists. You need to know the layout of the medium, where to start reading, how to perform any built-in error correcting, what constitutes data versus metadata. Once you read the bits, you still need to do all of that again, but this time at the level of the filesystem. Then you need to do it a third time at the level of the file format. Then you get, at best, something like a consecutive sequence of unicode code points. Now you still need to know unicode.
We have no idea if these sorts of technologies will be remembered in 3,000 years, but given the history, there's a very good chance people will still be able to read Sanskrit and Latin, and the way the human eyeball accepts and decodes light waves will not change.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
If the humans of the future are all blind, I think we can forget about worrying about preserving civilization.
Nothing has been verified to work beyond 50 years, and those with data errors and failure rates.
There are those CDs made out of rock, but they have never veen proven to pass the test of time.
Overall, though, properly-made CDs, handled carefully, have been excellent at storing data long-term.
But while this is nice enough I guess for storing individual musical albums long-term, it's not practical for storing truly large volumes of arbitrary data. CD-Rs and CD-RWs have not had the same durability demonstrated at all (quite the opposite in fact). DVDs are better at almost 4GB per disc, but here again only the factory ones are actually durable, and 4GB isn't going to store much these days, perhaps one movie with high lossy compression.
It had users who carefully performed benchmarks on media for more than a decade to see which types and makes held up best over time, along with best practices. Few have the interest or patience for such things so it's unfortunate to just have such info vanish.
I will add though that what's missing from the discussion is Blu-Ray, which allows up to 128GB per disc. (I only vaguely recall reading some critique of BD DL discs so can't say how it might compare long term though, apart from the greater cost at such capacities.)
128GB BD-R discs do exist, but at $219 on Amazon for 25 discs, that's about $0.07/GB. It would be MUCH cheaper to just buy a stack of refurbished enterprise-class HDDs and store your data on those, in triplicate, with a filesystem that has error correction (like ZFS). Personally, I would bet on HDDs used this way still being readable and not having bit-rot after 50 years over 4-layer BD-R discs.
Some other things to consider are at high capacities all HDDs use helium now, which slowly leaks (WD/HGST have a SMART stat about the level*) and the cost of running drives/associated computers/maintenance over a long span vs the up front cost of passive writable media (edit: for some reason I assumed this was what was meant but they could be left cold which would likely increase survival odds and be cheaper).
* And there isn't much long term data about it that I could find, though some have reported between 1-5 years the SMART stat either remaining at max or dropping a few digits. Even Backblaze outside of their first article a year into using them hasn't seemingly continued reporting on the stat that I've noticed. I get the sense though that other types of failures are expected sooner than leaks.
Whoops, thanks for pointing out the math error; I've fixed it.
>If one got particularly lucky with HDD failure rates perhaps they'd survive running that long in RAID but one would expect some replacements over such a long period.
I don't think so: I'm not talking about keeping these drives spinning for 50 years, but rather in cold storage, just as we'd do with the BDXL discs.
>Some other things to consider are at high capacities all HDDs use helium now, which slowly leaks (WD/HGST have a SMART stat about the level*) and the cost of running drives/associated computers/maintenance over a long span vs the up front cost of passive writable media.
Helium leakage is an issue I didn't think of, and I don't know how sitting in cold storage for 50 years would affect this. But again, the costs of running drives/maintenance/etc. should be zero, because I'm comparing apples to apples. No one would seriously propose a massive array of BDXL drives with BDXL discs continuously available, so likewise I'm proposing just keeping 10+TB HDDs in cold storage.
You're saying that something that has existed for less than 50 years doesn't count because we haven't been able to actually test it for more than 50 years, even though we understand the physics behind it and can theoretically predict how long it will last...
And a quick google reveals a lot of people are very worried about counterfeit disks too.
Ubiquitous access to reader devices is also a factor, and I can’t actually think of anything that fits that bill.
As for ubiquitous access, store a reading device or instructions on how to build one along with the data. If you're unable to do that, then I doubt you would be able to keep a massive library of books around for very long either.
There's also no financial incentive to build technologies like this. If the world actually got together and tried to build long-term digital storage then I'm sure we could come up with something even better.
An interesting technology, but also not exactly something I could get at my local Best Buy today.
M-DISC, assuming it's writable using consumer Blu-Ray writers, is promising though – Blu-Ray drives can probably still considered ubiquitous enough in a pinch.
> DNA storage
DNA is in fact extremely unstable unless it's part of living organisms that constantly error-correct and replicate it, and even then you have random mutations.
The scenario you're describing is incredibly specific. It requires a post-apocalyptic world where humans have survived, but have somehow completely lost all ability to access past knowledge. Civilization must be advanced enough to access and read a library that has been shielded from the elements for millennia, but not advanced enough to build microscopes or lasers, even when given precise instructions on how to do so. It must be far enough into the future that any possible small high-tech reading device we could create is unlikely to have survived, but not so far into the future that a very large library structure is likely to have collapsed.
100000 years is a very long time. And in that time, you have good chances of reeboting civilization and reconstructing our current industrial world.
> All you need to do is make a reading device that can last for a similar amount of time
Easier said than done, and why would you need to do it, if libraries already solve the problem?
BTW I think we're considering two different scenarios. Libraries are excellent at solving the scenario given here, i.e. the internet collapses tomorrow.
If humans were serious about protecting knowledge, they'd put these libraries on Svalbard or in Antarctica, or better yet in a lava tube on the Moon.
If the internet were to just suddenly "go down" globally it would of course be a disaster and result in much unrest, panic, supply chain breakdowns, and general collapse of society. It it so interwoven into everything we depend on.
society would end. some bumpy roads, sure, but we did very well before the internet and we’d do fine without it. we would just rebuild.
it’s just not as instrumental as some people make it out to be. nice? absofuckinlutely. necessary? nopes.
So a few years ago I started up a server that slowly (so as not to annoy any YouTube rate limits) downloaded copies of every video from channels I enjoy. I also threw in a few "normal" YouTube channels that I just happen to like.
Today it's archived over 7500 videos and it's still rolling along.
BBC Archive: https://www.youtube.com/@BBCArchive
AT&T Archives: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDB8B8220DEE96FD9
BBC Computer Literacy Project (UK only?): https://clp.bbcrewind.co.uk
The Computer Chronicles: https://archive.org/details/computerchronicles
Blue OS Museum: https://www.youtube.com/@BlueOSMuseum
My only problem with LTO5 tapes is the amount required to do backup. Were I going to do LTO, I'd have to go with LTO9 since they hold 18/45TB and are around $90 a tape.
[0] https://www.nightofthedead.org/security/hardware-write-prote...
I waited for years for used datacenter tape drives to become affordable. The math for DVD or hard drive cold storage didn't make sense, especially since I like redundant backups so it's 2x the cost. Tapes were designed for cold storage and it's faster and more cost effective than backing up to hard drives. Maybe I'll change my tune someday after a tape unravelling disaster if that ever happens, but in 2 years it's been pretty reliable.
Huh? I just bought some 10TB refurb drives from Amazon for $60 each.
A typical SATA HDD, by contrast, can be connected to any common consumer-grade motherboard, or you can just get a USB HDD dock if you really need to.
I bought an LTO 5 tape drive for $150. Do you really think that's "ultra expensive"? I do not. In fact I purchased 3 more LTO 5 drives for another $150 (I got lucky on that deal). These are all used datacenter hardware, tons of them on eBay now. The price is really not what you might be thinking it is.
> plus a computer somehow capable of actually holding and connecting to that drive
I have lots of computers, my backup computer is an old server of mine which is still very capable. It's just an old i5 computer, gaming motherboard, 16GB RAM but it can sustain 140MB/s write speed to the tapes. Good luck getting that sustained write speed on a refurb hard drive.
>they have SAS interfaces, so you need a computer with a SAS HBA just to install the thing
Yes, it cost me a total of $30, again from eBay. Not too expensive at all. I have purchased about 6 SAS cards from eBay for various computers (I have 3 RAID10 setups), none have failed, all have been very reliable, and they are all very inexpensive and easy to install.
> and you only find those on server-grade hardware.
You find them all over eBay for cheap. I installed these SAS cards in "gaming" motherboards. No, you do not need specialized "server-grade hardware" to install them into.
>You're not going to plug one of these things into your laptop.
Duh, laptops are for portability. If all you have is one single laptop you probably aren't doing anything serious anyway, and likely have no need for massive amounts of storage. I have desktops, servers, and laptops, and I use them all appropriately.
>A typical SATA HDD, by contrast, can be connected to any common consumer-grade motherboard, or you can just get a USB HDD dock if you really need to.
That's great, but it's still 2x more expensive per TB to hoard hundreds of TB of data. And hard drives do not have a write-protect notch, so as soon as you connect any hard drive to a compromised computer (whether you know it's compromised or not) you compromise the backup too.
Tapes were made for off-line long-term storage, hard drives were not. I have plenty of hard drives, but I know what they are for and I use them appropriately. I also know what tapes are for, and my life as a datahoarder has been far better (and more affordable) since I got the tape drives.
I do, because that's a BS price. I just looked on Ebay, and while there's a bunch of LTO-5 drives for somewhere around that price, they're all broken, "parts only". Actual working drives are much, much more expensive. $500 or more for just a drive isn't cheap.
$159 https://www.ebay.com/itm/286135602395 tested, working
$150 https://www.ebay.com/itm/267042154733
$120 https://www.ebay.com/itm/286121532918 - fully working
$179 https://www.ebay.com/itm/267036935814 - tested, working
Go troll somewhere else.
I downloaded as much documentation about the technology I relied on as possible. Ma pages, cloning repos, saving websites as HTML, etc. My goal was to have everything I needed in case I had to build my own internet again. Even if it was like cubas version that uses thumb drive based networking.
It worked for the most part. The one downside was having to ration my electricity usage as it was generated by a generator and fuel was not easy to come by.
This taught me that any kind of network requires a robust electrical grid. So, I’d install solar panels with batteries, a backup generator, some wind turbines, and then work on downloading all the documentation needed to make the network work.
I hardly travel anymore but still wind up using all of those local resources. It's zero web searches, next to no latency, and I have the structure memorized. Finding information I need is so fast.
I wish it was more popular to have a local-first mindset when writing software.
That said, it's not out of box like a Macbook.
What processor do you have?
I'm almost never CPU constrained, so I tend to have everything idled down as much as possible.
Edit: and just for context, opening firefox and browsing the web right now has me at 9W.
If all computers go down and all cables burn to ashes simultaneously then it's maybe a good idea to preserve RISC-V For Dummies and Cable-making For Dummies as well.
I wish we could preserve old school network engineers instead
It's funny that in times with "two big cisco core routers with hand written config" system were way more stable compared to now when everything is documented and built by "best practices".
What I'd really be concerned about would be our modern society. Purchasing food, water, fuel, clothes and other necessities would be near impossible. Supply chains would not just have problems, but literally fall apart. Money would stop moving.
If anything is "too big to fail" it would be the internet.
Along with no banking there's no way to order supplies. No way to accept delivery. The very least of your problems is music or Wikipedia.
And I know you're thinking cash will help you, but its not enough. We used to have forests of paper and squadrons of clerks- that simply doesn't exist anymore.
While we don't have forests of paper, we have pocket-sized computers that can talk peer to peer and store practically infinite amounts of transactions.
We don't have squadrons of clerks but we have software that can collate transactions locally.
The internet is certainly a useful tool for quick connectivity but there are definitely ways to do things without the internet and without reverting all the way back to cash/check and paper ledgers.
You will be unable to communicate except through face to face meetings. There is no more POTS(plain old telephone system), the entire world routes phone calls over the internet. There's no IM, the physical mail system will at least become dramatically backlogged if not fail entirely due to infrastructure failure internally and the new increased demand.
In my country is it not just that there isn't a POTS system, there isn't even copper. You have a FTTH(fiber to the home) link or a mobile connection. To my knowledge even in the US fiber terminates at the distribution point and your cable supply is last mile only.
I don't know what even will cause a global internet outage at the scale but it will be global panic.
A coordinated attack on key infrastructure (eg: root DNS servers) could do it. Much of the internet is held together with duct tape and bubble gum. The reason it stays alive is because there are a lot of duct tape and bubble gum specialists :)
There are still a lot of ways to communicate without the internet over large distances (eg: radio, satellite, plane, drone, etc...) and there are different considerations/requirements for them. They are still an ultimate backup to the world we have created but shopping on Amazon via ham-radio would be quite painful!
Grocery stores and bars used to let local trusted customers pay their accumulated purchases once per week or month, or accept personal checks from them without any means of verifying whether they were covered.
Today? It’s essentially cash or credit card, and no more mechanisms for local/decentralized credit decisions whatsoever, even if a checkout clerk might personally know a customer.
Because of ubiquitous connectivity, we have greatly increased, but also centralized trust. Local trust isn’t restored quickly, especially during an emergency when tensions are high anyway.
Ie: maybe I trust a mechanism by Google/Apple where tap becomes powered locally and the phone/device itself carries a balance.
It’s true that these solutions don’t exist today but they are not far away with the amount of pressure we are talking about by losing the internet.
Also, credit cards used to work in a similar way to checks. The information would be recorded and the transaction would be finalized later.
I came across a pre-magnetic-strip credit card years ago… it’s pretty fascinating how currency has evolved in the last half-century. There is no reason for me to think that it will stop where we are at today.
That's something I'd definitely love to see, but it doesn't exist at the moment (in the US, at least; in Japan, there are stored-value cards in Apple Wallet that can support two-side offline transactions).
> Also, credit cards used to work in a similar way to checks. The information would be recorded and the transaction would be finalized later.
They used to, but they don't anymore. Almost all terminals and many cards won't let you do an offline transaction these days, for both credit and debit cards.
> it’s pretty fascinating how currency has evolved in the last half-century. There is no reason for me to think that it will stop where we are at today.
True, but unfortunately as far as I can see, it's all been moving towards a more centralized/connection-dependent system. That's great for when everything is working as expected, but raises some concerns about resilience.
> it's all been moving towards a more centralized/connection-dependent system. That's great [...] but raises some concerns about resilience.
Agreed. I hope that someone in these giant fintech institutions has considered that. It wouldn't surprise me if it's "not seen as a priority" though.
1. ATM machines may stop working.
2. Your local bank branch may have issues knowing how much money you have on your account, making it hard to manually give you cash.
Both can be great issues, but can be worked around with a bit of time to prepare. Do you see other issues?
> but can be worked around with a bit of time to prepare
The prompt was "the Internet goes away tomorrow", and I highly doubt that we'd be able to resurrect branch-based "offline" banking in a single day.
i do beleive though that it would be only a temporary thing.
on a local level you can likely still enable a lot of stuff. the internet would most likely die due to a decision to disable it rather than mass equipment failure. also very unlikely, as a ton of people must disable it at the same time, knowing all full well the result of doing so...
if they do that so u can try to get a radio broadcast up with some equipment thats strapped to houses and appartment buildings eveywhere these days. see if some antennas can be enabled for telephony locally etc. get the spark going for getting a network back up. for isp equipment the same. you can enable and if needed reprogram/configure a lot of field equipment and enable local networks. perhaps depending on your locality even more (internet exchange and isp data centers are close to some people atleast).
quite sure it would be up and running again in no time locally. at some point networks would merge and an internet would form again...
all in all there's really not a lot anyone can do about it if people want to use these existing networks and equipment. unless they start cutting power to very large areas etc. etc., remove the equipment everywhere, or ourposefuly destroy it... - this line of thought is extremely unrealistic.
And how do we know that someone's pocket computer doesn't contain a forged list of transactions that never happened, or is missing some transactions that did happen?
It's not that long ago that software was distributed on CD and tutorials in printed books. The internet adds a lot of convenience and productivity, but it's hardly a requirement.
Large open source projects would be much more difficult. Though some of them are already either largely done by one company (so people can meet in person) or very hierarchical (like Linux).
Large open source projects can survive, but I'd imagine it will lean much more towards being developed mainly singular organizations. Without the internet, we don't just lose contributors, but also a lot of testers. The feedback loop will probably shrink, such that the software is mainly based on the need of the organization itself, and the perhaps a selected few collaborators who are very involved.
It's the equivalent of "if your house was burning down what would you grab?"
My most likely "internet down" scenario would be my local government deciding to launch a national firewall, probably under the guise of "combatting disinformation, malinformation, misinformation, and foreign interference".
For that scenario I need as many VPNs as possible, a VPS in a friendly jurisdiction, and a TOR browser.
If the "internet is down" for "good", it's hard to me to think of a scenario where it didn't bring down the rest of civilization down along with it.
* Offline copies of Wikipedia, Stack Overflow and some others using Kiwix
* Arch Linux iso and mirror of some packages for installing a new system
* Godot Engine along with game assets shamefully stolen from hl2, so I can have some creative outlet, or make training sims if things got so bad
* Hours of videos and songs I like
Today I would probably include Llama or other LLMs.
It's unfortunate to see big companies pushing for an online-only world. Windows 11 requiring Internet access to install, YouTube restricting yt-dlp and YouTube Premium downloaded videos only being playable if the app was able to ping YouTube servers in the past few days. It really feels like technology is regressing, we are creating new problems for ourselves for no good reason. But I guess it's fine when all of the company offices are in rich Western countries with fast and stable internet access.
The perspective on this changes if you stop being a consumer, and start being an author.
The people that download the book from these sites would never have bought them. Having your book downloaded by 10k people doesn't mean you've lost 10k sales, what it does mean is that you've got up to 10k people that wouldn't have bought the book anyway talking about it, effectively becoming word of mouth advertisers.
This isn't quiet as true for movies/tv series etc, because their value (entertainment time/price) is so much lower. Books on the other have usually cost $5-30 and will take 4-30 hours to read through. At that price point, very very few people will download the books to save what amounts to a single meal. Especially if you consider that so few people actually read several books per year (that's essentially $<30 per year "saved" via illegal downloads)
It could become an issue if a for-profit company could serve them legally however, I agree with that. It's hard to really talk about that, though ... It's a pure what-if/speculation after all
How many of those 10k purchases didn’t buy it because it was available for free somewhere? The point is, as you said, you don’t know.. However we do know the opposite is true, once Napster went away people started paying for Pandora. Netflix password crackdown lead to increased subscriptions.
When your desirable product isn’t available for free, people will trend towards buying it.
I often download books before buying them because I otherwise have no reasonable means to judge their content. This is not much different from flipping through the pages of a book in a library before buying it. The appeal of reading from an actual physical book is not something that any digital form can replace, so the book being available in digital form won't stop me from buying a copy. I also have no interest in Kindles and DRM.
Music, on the other hand, might be a different story except for select audiophiles who prefer vinyl.
So I don't think we can generalize to "product" like you do in your argument. Details and facts actually matter.
Corey Doctorow has the right idea. <sic> “I give my works away for free. Every time I gain another fan I gain another person who might want to own the hardback of my new book.”
If your desirable product is available for free more people find you, like you, follow you, patronize you. A lot of those people have money and are happy to give it to you to support you continuing to make good work.
This distribution problem doesn't really exist with books at the moment as Kindle exists.
What is the algebraic empty solution to "all" again? I can't remember if you are right.
Source: I'm an author.
Music that I do not already have on CD. Videos that contain useful knowledge on DIY medical procedures, DIY home repair and assorted other DIY knowledge. I archive this stuff already. That's about it really. I try to avoid any dependency on the internet or smart phones given the commercial internet did not exist for a big part of my life.
Are those "Lingerie and Adult Toys" stores on the outskirts of town filled with DVD's and magazines?
Telegram, Discord and assorted communities do a lot for keeping some semblance of "stashing" alive
Also there's Whisparr
The "weird" part of it (And why I believe a lot of people don't think about it at first) is the amount of forethought that this involves "The algorithm" plays a significantly larger part on sites where it's considered a faux pas to have an account, and actively curating a collection is considered creepy, unlike with music
Of course the relevant stores will not be very common.
If you would like to begin preparing for your tomorrows, this is a good place to start: https://the-eye.eu/public/Books/
Also, OpenLibrary, AniDB / Anilist / Anime-Planet / GoodReads / IMDB / jeuxvideo.com / Last.fm / LibraryThing / MangaUpdates / MyAnimeList / MyDramaList / NovelUpdates / Shikimori / TheTVDB / WLNUpdates (databases of various entertainment stuff).
Then I can look in the GPS where to find them.
I wish there was a simple, portable, plug-and-play solution for downloading and viewing maps on Linux/Desktop computers.
- bootable linux usb drives which can be inserted into any PC.
- archives of programming languages - the source code for the language as well as all the libraries. Eg. mvn, npm, cargo, pip, etc.
- archive of 'important' projects on Github
Ideally, you should be able to boot from USB and compile any application without internet.
- Maps (including trails)
- Growing food - agriculture, raising animals, etc
- Medicine, chemistry, biology, pharmacology books/videos/etc
- Educational programs (like Khan Academy)
- AI models and all the dependencies required to run them offline (eg. GPU drivers, etc).
This archive would be quite clumsy if it came as just a bunch of zip files, so a search index for all this content would be of great help.
I've been long thinking about working on this Archive.. I believe there would be enough people willing to purchase it just for archival purposes.
It would come in handy if we were to travel to other planets too !
Hit me up if you think this is worth working on, I'd happily join/lead such an effort.
[1] https://www.robinwhittleton.com/books/
[2] https://standardebooks.org/
All that to mainly say..I appreciate you. It's one of my favorite projects, and I hope it keeps going strong indefinitely.
Wikipedia in my language.
Music and movies that are important to me that I only access via streaming. Maybe a few TV shows in SD.
A giant bundle of ebooks is I can find one (e.g., in a public torrent).
Open-source ecology.
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The things I'd really want archived but that there probably wouldn't be time to archive in such a short period without already having mostly-complete offline copies:
It would be just the global internet? What would want to have in our local (continent, country, city, home, etc) internet provided that I have enough resources? The balkanization of Internet is still in the menu.
Or it may be some global event disabling all computers, like a cosmic EMP?
There are several “easy” things to download and have usable somehow. Wikipedia used to have available as download copy of the database. Google still have takeout for all my things that it have stored. A lot of the public code in GitHub or other public repositories are easy to download.
we could probably rebuild civilization just from 3blue1brown.
It's definitely one of the best learning resources on the topics it covers, but I'd say the actual textbooks are a more valuable resource. After all his most timeless videos cover traditional calculus and linear algebra. Stuff you'd find explained in a more rigorous and confusing fashion in every tech undergrad curriculum.
Also I'd be more concerned with mechanical engineering over CNNs in times of rebuilding civilization.
But there are a lot of knock-off channels, which you're presumably referring to, where people build things that are basically mini-castles, and pools filled with water using a pipe network, etc. And those are definitely at least partially fake.
https://www.youtube.com/@primitivetechnology9550
They are interesting, valuable records of humanity in the early 21st century, but they - and other social media - contain a higher volume of misinformation and disinformation than anything the world has seen, and I'd say a higher proportion than anything since (the Middle Ages? Hard to compare.). Think of the infinite conspiracy theories and just plain bad information on Reddit, for example.
while you are probably sincere, when I hear terms like misinformation and disinformation these days I think, "tell me you have a received ontology without telling me you have a received ontology." that's how divided the discourse is. I'd save them because those sites were what people said when they felt they could express themselves honestly, and all gems are covered in muck, it just takes some digging and refinement.
I agree! That's the knee-jerk reaction from people caught up in the disinformation. There is truth, and we all have received ontologies - you've received yours from 4chan. The point of disinformation is not to persuade you about a lie, but to paralyze the public by taking away truth, discussion, consensus. You and I can't discuss any factual truth because of your ontology.
> what people said when they felt they could express themselves honestly
If they agreed with the 4chan (etc) received ontology. For example, what I wrote would get the same reaction you gave me, though much more aggressively and dismissively. People were only honest as far as it agreed with the ontology; beyond that they lied or went someplace else.
> humor is a more reliable signal for truth than official consensus any day
I'm not surprised to see that. IMHO it's nonsense rhetoric - means nothing, sounds good. Right from 4chan / reddit / etc.
> I think they captured something essential.
Agreed. They are special places, but not for any sort of factual truth.
> they were the vox populi
They are only narrow subsets of the public.
the difference between a natural and recieved ontology is like a received pronunciation, people use it because they were told to use it for in-group signaling, and not as the effect of competence, principle, or experience. the people who are affectedly concerned about disinformation aren't reasoning from base reality or experience, they are iterating a logic of ideas used for in-group signaling. one of those ideas equates criticism with competence.
a received ontology is an affect, whereas a natural ontology is an effect. a mind that can't tell the difference between effect and affect is not equipped to apprehend the consequences of experience or competence, or of an ontology derived from it. it operates on representations and believes others do because that's the depth of its own experience, its consciousness exists on a substrate of languge and material symbols navigated by criticism. in a word, godless.
the beauty of sites like reddit, 4chan, and related ones is that for all their astroturfing, they accumulate honesty that people managing a hegemonic narrative persona can't allow to exist. disinformation and conspiracy theories exist, but I would argue the perspective that problematizes them is just an in-group affectation.
Who will keep reading after you say something ignorant, offensive, and fabricated like this? Again, you seem to have learned the lesson of propaganda: Shut down discourse.
The things I store are those that seem valuable and information-dense, the kinds that I would be able to use in a relatively prolonged isolation. Storage space is limited, and redundancy is important for backups, so more copies of important information are preferable, to some extent, over added less important information. That is, one may consider tiered backups.
Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg, perhaps as OpenZIM archives (for Kiwix, making them more readily accessible), look like good starting points, along with other Wikimedia projects (e.g., Wikisource, Wiktionary; also available as OpenZIM archives). A music collection is a part of my personal backups. Then there are textbooks: OpenStax provides good ones under the CC BY license, LibreTexts books are of variable quality, but also worthwhile to look into, while WikiBooks are mostly disappointing. Then one may consider copyright-infringing book libraries, if one is fine with those. A few hundred gibibytes seem sufficient for a decent stockpile, including a good chunk of human knowledge, and providing plenty to do alone (read and study, that is).
Textbooks could be much more lightweight if their sources (e.g., in LaTeX) were provided, rather than PDFs, but unfortunately even for those under permissive licenses, usually only PDFs are available, which hinders both printing (as another form of backups) and regular digital data storage.
I expect the government will block software repositories among the last ones, so not backing up those yet, but mirroring, say, Debian archive (including sources) may be a good idea for such a situation, or when preparing for the Internet to go down.
If one has a lot of extra storage available, other easily available large data dumps to consider are Common Crawl, arXiv bulk data downloads, complete OSM data, huge copyright-infringing libraries, and videos: plenty of nice YouTube channels and TV series.
Open Street Maps - definitely detailed North America + planet for good measure
deepseek-coder-v2 236b - Great coding assistant
llama 3.1 70b - Much more practical to run
My Google Photos since I have lots of good memorries on there.
For the internet to "go down for an indefinite period" there would need to be some pretty big changes to our current world. The reason it "goes down" also matters a lot.
1) Political reasons (eg: whomever is in power wants to control information flow)
This will likely mean that certain kinds of information can still flow because we don't want to crash the entire economy.
In this case, I would want all of the information I could get my hands on about known history. This includes previous regimes and how they ultimately played out.
2) Geo-political (some other country bans your access to their resources)
This is a harder case to enforce without complete isolation ... but theoretically possible.
In this case, technical howtos are still useful as you can probably still get modern supplies. Depending on what my country produces, I would probably want to get all information about those processes as I could. Also, if my country doesn't produce a lot of food, information on what can be grown locally would be helpful... along with ways to protect it from nature.
3) Global catastrophe (plague/virus/nuclear winter/etc...)
Maybe enough of the internet is just "lost" and the technical means to resurrect it has also disappeared.
At this point, you need to think about being completely self-sufficient. ie: Grow your own food, make your own tools, protect yourself from animals and people. It would be helpful to have some tools at the start for this. Maybe even just basic gardening tools and a greenhouse ... and whatever form of protection makes the most sense to you. Find some land that can sustain you; Leftover city supplies will likely disappear very fast.
4) All of the above, simultaneously.
It's time to just get a Bible and start praying. Maybe a bunker, too. Survival will likely be a lot of luck and a lot of cunning.
Any examples? Do all computers have capacitors that will die within a certain number of years?
Running CPUs and boards at lower power settings can also help. Thermal cycling is the enemy of longevity. Being able to control CPU frequency will be helpful.
Many power supplies have electrolytic caps in them as well. If you can stick to a standard that’s easy to find then there is a good chance you can just salvage an existing power supply that has managed to survive.
Some cheaper examples to consider would be raspberrypi boards with usb-c power. Don’t run them at full speed to reduce long-term thermal effects. About a decade ago I would have suggested Intel Atom based systems for similar reasons.
Server hardware is often made to a better spec for longevity. I miss old sparc hardware; I feel like those machines could last forever.
Today, arm based systems are probably a good bet since you can find lots of software for them and they run cooler than (say) x86 variants of similar caliber.
Storage is the next Achilles heel to consider. Cheap flash will die sooner rather than later. I’m not up on the best tech in this space anymore though so somebody else might chime in here.
Finally, displays can be pretty fragile. Phone displays actually come to mind as a decently ruggedized technology. Bigger displays are probably more prone to damage long-term so, small and durable is probably valuable here.
I’ll probably catch flak for this but… a smartphone is actually a pretty decent computer that can last a very long time. If you can run arbitrary software on it and keep it in one place instead of in your pocket, it could be a good get. The issue I know of here is the battery; if it gets too weak then some phones may not be able to power up completely even with a power supply attached.
For historians - Wikipedia and YouTube.
For my use? Google Maps (or actually Mapy.cz, local Czech map provider data). I think it might get useful when hunting for zombies.
Are not data provided by OpenStreetMap?
Anyway in case of no-internet something like Organic Maps would work better then apps with login.
I don't read How to write horrible code and what to do when that's your codebase. I do have to know the latter a bit, but no more than necessary.
But, people have been trying to predict the end of the world since antiquity so there's that
I also like the opposite thought experiment, turns out I have so much of the Internet that I'd love to never come back online. The whole shitcoin scene, poof, gone.
Knowledge/Entertainment: A huge subset of LibGen/Anna's Archive. Wikipedia. Survival guides. Tons of websites, especially smaller ones that might not get preserved. I think the NYTimes will be fine, but random indie websites, not so much. Lots of music. Project Gutenberg and swaths of the Online Books Page listed items. Videos, and of course VLC (if it's not already downloaded). Various coding things (I, I assume unusually for HN, am not a programmer and don't know any programming languages, might as well learn to code.) Minecraft or a knockoff, on the off chance I somehow get bored.
Creating: LibreOffice (if it's not already installed). If it works offline, the Inspiral app, because spirographs make everything better. Gimp, Inkscape, Krita.
Personal: Records of as much of my digital life as I can get. So comments, posts, etc. I want to be able to look back at who I was.
Organization: Calibre (again, assuming it's not installed). Obsidian.
Most written content I am interested in I already have backed up (for example PDFs of various Wikipedia articles).
Maybe also the latest DVD release of Tumbleweed in case I have use for it.
[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.kiwix.kiwi...
It would also be nice to download the "card catalog" of the local library for offline use at home, if that was possible.
Truth is, "tomorrow" is not enough advance notice for me to save much. Need to be proactive, i.e., "What have I already preserved if the internet went down tomorrow".
I'd probably write some tools to organize it all, and end up re-creating most of the good content of the sites I like to visit.
After this, I'd get to the 8 Terabyte NAS I've had tucked away, with all the crap I've ever downloaded since 1993. :P
My Steam collection won't work because it needs the Internet and DRM to work.
Educational resources for training people in skills they’ll need. Everything from K-12 to eHow.
Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica to preserve our knowledge. Specialist ones like the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and Mayo Clinic, too.
Source code for major OSS like Linux, OpenOffice, etc. Hardware designs, too. Especially old-school stuff on primitive fabs or hand-wired. We’ll be covered both ways.
I think we can remake everything else from scratch using the prior lessons learned.
Imperfect as they are they’re an incredibly dense summary of the internet.
And then duplicate all the repos plus maybe a couple of those old school multi dvd Ubuntu editions intended for offline. Just in case I missed something like a dev essentials package. Copies of the top handful of python packages would also be grand
Chances of missing something crucial is sky high though so this would need a dry run
We were discussing in my office today how there might be widespread protests about the election result soon.
Who knows how crazy people get, a few dedicated pissed people in a few key places could be quite disastrous.
And how much would a solution be worth to you?
That's why I have a consumer NAS at home where I backup all my most precious media. Simply because I've worked in IT for 20 years so I believe more in off-site backups than I do in the reliability of IT services.
I really like the setup since it doesn't require a bunch of time investment, there's no custom scripts to set up or community packages to install.
Also, a bunch of dev related git repos, such as zig, rust, microsft/stl, python
It's less than 100 TiB, and I think that if the Internet went away right now, I'd be okay information/entertainment wise for the rest of my life.
It sparks some amazement in me still to wrap my head around the reality of so much information in a thing the size of my pinky. Or the size of my pinky nail if you use a micro SD card. And yeah, just took a weekend of downloading and setting it up, and flashdrives/microsd cards are easily found at department stores, or even gas stations sometimes.
Even disregarded any potential doomsday utility, the amusement/amazement it's brought me was well worth the modest time/money it took. I hope more people give it a try
If they don't, digital storage is utterly worthless.
"All the objects we found in the domestic site 1357.# contain the same marking, "MAD EIN CHIN A". We have been unable to decode this but its presence on everything we found suggests that it was a prayer or mantra to a domestic god"
It'd eventually sort itself out to the ways pre-internet, sure - but so much now is built on internet-connected tech, not pre-internet tech.
Mind, it probably wouldn't work for me, I have fiber to my house, no POTS. I dunno if the old 56K modems work or not.
who knows how long the net goes down for, and if i try to just save what exists, it would run out after _some_ time (maybe not my time, but when unknown time horizons are probable, a generator > a pile, imo)
Nothing. I'd be too busy celebrating.
(Even though I'd likely be out of work.)
Never Gonna Give You Up by Rick Astley so I can rick roll people on the post-internet era.
Newgrounds.
Downloading music, some great movies, books. For other content I have DevonThink database
- You can do anything at zombo com
All OSM data and openaddresses data.
I would double-check my offline backups of everything I care about (personal files and professional projects, as well as local copies of music and videos), be sure my local maps are up to date for directions, and perhaps grab new videos from a YouTube channels to have some new entertainment in case I wasn't able to get anything new for a while.
Otherwise, there's not much I'd want. Presumably my local library would still have books, and the radio would still carry news. Most of what I find valuable on the internet are things that refresh in near real-time like message boards and news, or aren't really data to be backed up so much as services I use like ordering food or checking my bank balance.
Having recently gone through over three weeks of power, internet, and cell service outage with Hurricane Helene, at no point was I tempted to go into town and download me some more internet for use offline.
Even if the studio can get the signal out to a transmitter, how will news get to the studio? How will you be able to trust it? You might have someone saying something in a CB radio if you have one, but can you rely on that random person?
Whether I can rely on the information I get is a good point, but it seems like we as a society struggle with that just as much with the internet as without. Forced decentralization through broken connections may have played as much of a positive role in preserving the integrity of information as it was a negative.
Beyond that, how does the studio receive information? By say phone? SMS?
Again depends what “the internet” means
The original question, though, was what would I preserve, and news was an example of something that can't be backed up ahead of time.
Nothing, let it go down ;-)
They are important, and slowly being lost to time and produced less and less …
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41854518
Even simple things like this would be difficult. For starters, ticketing tends to be powered by 5G on buses and over physical networks for permanent fare gates like at a railway station.
Bus arrivals screens and boards at stations are also fed by the network.
I guess if we take a generous interpretation of the OP's question though, those would still be able to function assuming they work over a private network instead of the internet.
- Wikipedia articles
- YouTube videos
- Google images
Yes we'd lose probably a good chunk of cultural artifacts but 99% of those are transient and will eventually be lost to the sands of time anyway (this is true for nearly every era).
Meanwhile the 'culture' downstream of the internet is vapid, self-centered, packed with rage and perversion, does little to stop human suffering or strife, and is essentially a wealth consolidation and mass surveillance tool for the gentry.
That said, I have done this prior to a combat deployment in a faraway land, I loaded a ton of books, wikipedia, and movies/TV shows up on an external harddrive.
I used it maybe twice and for non-critical stuff. It was eye-opening (and refreshing) how little me, my buddies, or the people we were working with cared about this nonsense, especially upon the realization that it had almost no bearing or impact on who we were or what we were doing.
Nothing at all.
Surveillance. That's the main purpose, isn't it ? /s
I say this because the Internet is so integral to our current society and way of life that it would be like losing access to electricity. Most young people have never lived in a world without Internet access. Electronic payments, logistics, food distribution, etc would all stop functioning. Society is far more fragile than anyone wants to admit and people would panic.