rayaso | Distributed Death: The End of the Internet

LJ Idol, Season 9, Week 5
“Build A Better Mousetrap”

“If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.” Attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882).

DISTRIBUTED DEATH

The End of the Internet

September 2, 2024

The Internet officially died yesterday in a small, grey room at UCLA. It was here in September 1969 that Prof. Leonard Kleinrock installed the first node on the ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet. In a sparsely attended ceremony Prof. Kleinrock returned to disconnect the node, the Internet's last surviving element.

The Internet has now followed the Pony Express and the telegraph into irrelevancy. Success killed it, rather than better technology. By 2015, it had become fully integrated into global life. Finance, commerce, government, the military, education, and society were all online. It seemed as if life itself depended on the perpetual transmission of electronic packets of information distributed over the Internet.

The Internet’s complete domination was also its greatest weakness. As it evolved, so did hackers. Mere computer pranksters at first, hackers later became electronic pirates, invading even the most secure systems to raid financial and personal information, causing billions of dollars in losses.

Under pressure from banks and merchants, Congress passed the Internet Security Act of 2017, which protected all financial and commercial entities against claims for losses suffered as a result of hacking. With this change, the pirates finally won. The Act removed any financial incentive for businesses to prevent electronic theft. “‘Caveat emptor’ is the cornerstone of American Democracy” proclaimed Senator Rand Paul. “The government must not intrude into the lives of law-abiding American patriots.”

Internet historian Jennifer Stevens firmly believes that “the Internet could have survived these minor growing pains, but the business practices of Microsoft and Apple wound up killing the golden goose.”

In 2017, Microsoft and Apple had faced a market saturated with their products. Searching for radically new operating systems to force consumers to replace existing ones, Microsoft and Apple partnered with universities and government researchers (“the Consortium”) to discover new ways to overcome the limitations of binary code. Binary code only allowed yes/no or on/off programming. The Holy Grail was true tertiary code, which provided for yes/no/maybe code. Adding “maybe” to the mix allowed software to mimic actual human thought. This expanded the utility of computers exponentially.

A workable tertiary programming language was finally achieved in 2019. Asserting public interest, the participating universities and government researchers insisted on a universal standard operating system based on open-source code, with no copyrights or patents. Microsoft and Apple reluctantly agreed, knowing the huge profits in marketing replacement software for old products.

The end of the Internet began when a bored Consortium engineer idly wondered if the proposed operating system could be made completely transparent. Alan MacDonald envisioned a world in which every computer was directly connected to every other computer. In testifying later before Congress, MacDonald explained that his idea “. . . was to make it so that whatever was on your computer could be on mine, and vice versa. All the computers everywhere would be open to any other computer. Passwords or other protections would be impossible. Obviously, I didn't think this through very carefully.”

MacDonald hid his transparency code in one of the operating system's many sub-routines, and for good measure added a two-year time delay before it became active.

The new Tertiary Operating System was truly revolutionary. Best of all, it was available online for free. Everyone downloaded it. It was so successful that in two years, nearly every personal, business, or government computer was running it.

Two years passed, and on January 1, 2021, MacDonald’s time bomb went off. The world woke up to absolute transparency. Every computer was linked to every other computer. There were no more secrets. “Great power should bring great responsibility,” stated internet critic Eugene Moore, noting that “Unfortunately, we used that power to find out if our neighbors were watching porn.”

It didn't take long for the public to find out that Area 51 actually existed, or that the moon landings had been faked, the CIA had assassinated JFK, and President George (“Mission Accomplished”) Bush had known there were no weapons of mass destruction when he had invaded Iraq. Nuclear launch codes were available for all, although everyone was afraid to use them. Men used Air Force drones to spy on women sunbathing next door, and many personal scores were settled with drone strikes. Inexplicably, the collateral damage was deemed acceptable.

Complete transparency created a catastrophic worldwide financial disaster. All financial accounts became publicly accessible. Billions of dollars could be stolen by someone with a laptop, and just as quickly stolen again by someone else. Money zipped around the globe in a massive game of ping-pong. The richest person was the one with the fastest computer, at least for a few minutes. It didn't matter whether it was cartel drug money, Cayman Island accounts, Bank of America holdings, or the U.S. Federal Reserve. The dollar and the pound soon were no more valuable than old bitcoin.

Transparency was a disaster. Alan MacDonald became the most hated person on Earth.

Unfortunately, what was done could not be undone. Because all computers were simultaneously linked, it was impossible to remove the transparency code. It would have had to be deleted from all computers on the planet at the same time, an impossible task.

The real solution was simple: unplugging all the computers from the Internet. It started with those who had the most to lose, such as governments and banks. Individuals were slower to unplug. We apparently enjoyed spying on our neighbors far too much, even while we hated being spied upon ourselves.

Computers still worked offline, of course. They were simply no longer able to communicate with each other.

The results of The Great Unplugging were mixed: finances were stabilized; government work could once again be conducted in the dark; and the pornography industry disappeared. Bloggers had to find real work, while Amazon.com and iTunes collapsed. However, postal services rebounded for the first time in years, as snail-mail replaced e-mail.

Productivity soared. There were no more Angry Birds, cute babies, cats riding Roombas, viral videos, or other easily accessible distractions. Teenagers were among the hardest hit. They lost their online games and social media sites, while parents had more time to spend with them. Personal interaction once again became the norm, and newspapers, magazines, and books returned.

People knew the end of the Internet was near when Starbucks began advertising “WiFi Free” rather than “Free WiFi” and Hewlett-Packard successfully sold computers with no internet access. Hackers were left to go back to wherever they came from.

The true impact of the life and death of the Internet may never be known. It united us all, while showing us the dangers created by such unity. Still, human beings yearn for connection while also being deeply private. Technology marches on, and someone, somewhere will build a better internet once again.

If we have learned anything, however, we will hesitate before beating a path to that door.

* * * * *

“Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”
Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or Life in the Woods (1854).

Note: I will be travelling this coming week and I will not have internet access. I will not be able to thank you properly for reading and commenting on my entry, so let me do so here. I greatly appreciate the time you have spent on my story, especially given the multitude of entries to choose from. I hope you have enjoyed it. Thank you.