1793 sats \ 2 replies \ @justin_shocknet 26 Dec 2023 \ on: Have you thought about when the internet goes offline? 🌐 privacy
I don't see a restricted internet as a long term risk, the genie is out of the bottle and governments attempting to put it back in will do so at their peril.
However, because the internet is nearly impossible restrict and many governments are on the verge of collapse, I do think the probability of an extended outage (weeks/month) is greater than 50% in the next Bitcoin epoch.
At the current levels of dependence, this internet blackout would be almost as bad as a power blackout. Supply chains are heavily reliant on software, and software today is extremely interconnected. A multi-week outage may result in the deaths of millions during and well after the outage as resource coordination recovers.
Ironically, I was just without power for 6 days due to a weather event. I'm a very well prepared person in a remote area, but drills such as this give you an appreciation for how impossible it is to be truly prepared. I know many people who have adopted an off-grid lifestyle and have lived that way for years, only to find they still go into town every few weeks. A black swan would be far more than just an inconvenience.
Here's a more narrow thought experiment. Imagine "bugging in" for 30 days with one simple scope:
Water.
Drinking, cooking, toilets, hygiene.
You use a lot of water.
Scavenging water has security and other risks, storage is high maintenance and costly, and generation depends on a combination of luck, ingenuity, and energy.
If you're serious about prepping, think long and hard about how you'd solve your water problem and the fragility of what you come up with.
This will make you think about other matters more holistically.
Well said. Bit embarrassed this wasn't a point in it's own right above. Water I presume was the thing you found most difficult during those 6 days?
reply
It's in our nature to take the simplest things for granted.
Water was upstream of my biggest issue, so it's fair to say yes.
I have a deep well over some of the best ground water in the world, but a well pump takes a lot of on-demand energy. I have a generator, but that generator itself takes energy, and I had just barely enough for those 6 days with rationing.
In a real SHTF scenario, I would have to eventually fill jugs at a natural spring a few miles away, every 2 days. SHTF +30 I'd likely run out of gasoline in the vehicles to do that with, adding yet more complications.
Crossing my fingers that a generator didn't shit the bed is more prepared than most people can manage, scarily enough.
reply