As far as the internet and society goes, the internet gets switched off in many places from time to time (elections, civil unrest) are you ready for the day that it gets switched off for an unending period of time, what do you have to get you through it?
Yes, to a small extent.<p>One of the subjects I teach is "resilience". We do two lectures as
part of a general security course, and I added one to a "contemporary
issues in ICT", and a seminar in "civic cybersecurity".<p>We consider Carrington/EMP events, extreme weather threats, political
shutdowns, emergent faults and black swans. As responses we look at
the technology of mesh nets, ad-hoc community networks, emergency
broadcast systems, regressing from DNS to local hostfiles, local
storage nodes for things like Wikipedia snapshots.<p>You have to split the problem into three fundamental categories,
storage, communication and processing.<p>We generally assume that telephone systems would remain operational,
but that is no longer a good assumption now that DC battery storage on
analogue lines is phased out for fibre or co-ax. The biggest threat
we've identified is "cashless society", which would be a total
catastrophe whichever way you cut it.<p>Local storage is cheap and solved. Most individuals and many small
institutions like schools would survive fine for months on end. I have
a Wiki snapshot that's 5 years old and still makes great, informative
reading, plus old Microsoft Encarta, which is great. I've got about
80GB of books as textfiles from Gutenberg and Archive.org (enough for
many lifetimes of reading) I've used youtube-dl to always grab and
store videos to save bandwidth (because one almost always needs to
review them), so I've a couple of 2TB drives just filled with
interesting talks and lectures.<p>When it comes to communication that's a different story. We've played
around with BATMAN to make ad-hoc meshnets, but any such project
requires coordination. Short of walking around the neighbourhood with
instruction leaflets and CD ROMs its a huge barrier to bootstrap a
community network.<p>For resilience planning you need to eliminate any devices or software
that needs connectivity just to work, or will fail unsafe without
regular updates.
I've got a huge reading backlog that I'd like to get through. Also a decent stockpile of beans, rice, oatmeal, firewood and some other essential things.
That is probably an easier question for those of us who grew up before it existed in the first place. We lived our lives just fine pre-internet. Communication was slower. It was more important to hang out with friends and family. Games were played around a table. Research was done at libraries. But we still went to school and work, had chores to do. We still socialized, and enjoyed various indoor and outdoor activities.<p>Everyone would adapt, just the way we all adapted when the internet become popular in the first place. Both lifestyles have had their pros and cons.