Lately, I’ve been trying to come up with ways to ruin the Internet.
Not by using any means that would get me put on a terror watch list (targeting infrastructure is just so gauche), nor by counting on a well-placed comet or convenient thermonuclear cataclysm to bring about the end of civilization (which would presumably also take care of the Internet, though the spammers would probably find a way to survive, just to spite us).
Instead, since we in the post-industrial West have gotten so dependent on the Internet, I’m looking at scenarios where society, as a whole, is scared, discouraged, or otherwise convinced to give up the Internet.
Since this is squarely in the realm of science fiction, it’s only natural that we find a few examples waiting for us:
* The Internet as a direct cause of sickness: The movie Johnny Mnemonic (which, other than the name and a few plot points, has practically nothing to with the original short story) brought us a debilitating “Nerve Attenuation Syndrome” (a.k.a. The Black Shakes).
While there’s a modern day analog in those folks who claim they’re allergic to wi-fi (these people are collectively known as “whackjobs”), NAS was a sickness caused by technological society as a whole, rather than Internet usage in particular. But we’re on the right track.
* The Internet as a vector of sickness: While the visual virus of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash comes to mind immediately (a binary bitmap, resembling “snow” on a TV screen, that irrevocably crashed the brain of any computer programmer who looked at), a more interesting concept that predated it is the basilisk, introduced by David Langford in his short story BLIT.
Named for the basilisk of mythology (a creature that killed with its gaze), Langford’s basilisk was an image, originally discovered in a fractal pattern, that the human brain simply couldn’t handle, killing anyone who viewed it. Simple enough to be spray-paint stenciled on walls, it also caused the transmission of images over the Internet to become a crime punishable by death, as noted in the notional comp.basilisk.faq, a USENET newsgroup FAQ set in a world where the basilisk is a real threat, the Internet is plain text only, and TV is a memory.
The only real-world equivalent we have (and it’s a stretch) would be the use of images on “shock sites” (look it up in Wikipedia, I’m not even going to link the article, since even the written descriptions are gross), shown to unsuspecting users to freak them out.
While the phrases, “I’m scarred for life,” “I hate you for showing me that,” “eye bleach” and “unicorn chaser” are often uttered by people exposed to shock sites, they still wouldn’t be able to bring Internet usage to a grinding halt, though they could, just like a Rickroll, devalue the link economy, albeit locally, temporarily — by training people not to click on links, you might slow the usage of the Internet, but nothing yet is going to roll it back. Not even spam.
Until that comet hits, of course.
Do you have a way to ruin the Internet? (Besides spam.) Leave a comment.
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