[Jupe]

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.

[bruce511]

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.

[imoverclocked]

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.

[viraptor]

I have to recommend "Zero Day Code", which is more or less a story about all of that. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/51080208

[gorbypark]

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.

[BrandoElFollito]

We saw a lot of this from France - I was wondering whether people got out of the city massively or whether they stayed?

[rgbswan]

6 weeks tops until everything would run on LoRa (again), with nothing but important info, no ads, and all in TUIs, mmmmmmmhhhhhh

[hinkley]

So grumpy.

It's the equivalent of "if your house was burning down what would you grab?"

[tenpies]

I was thinking about this too.

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.

[chgs]

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.