Are We Killing Ourselves Through Internet Dependence?

Can you survive without the Internet?

Without the Internet, would you have a job? If you have a job, how would it be different without the Internet?

Can you feed yourself without the Internet? Would you know the first thing about feeding, housing, taking care of yourself, let alone a family?

Look at what is happening in the world today. Massive servers with almost unlimited memory. Millions and millions of computer users globally, many enticed to be slaves to a keyboard in one sense or another.

Lose that ability, lose your license to exist. As Gates and Google get richer and fatter, we become more and more dependent. It is conquering the human spirit and human drive without a fight.

Each day that goes by we are more and more dependent. Think about it. What if a massive power failure occurs in a major city that lasts for more than a few days? That city, or big portions of it, would die.

Look at New Orleans a year after Hurricane Katrina. There’s your example. Now multiply that, say, by 100. Los Angeles, Seattle, Houston, New York, Chicago, Miami … If New Orleans is still pretty much of a dead pit without power, without the Internet, it’s a fate that could surely meet other cities for other reasons. Earthquakes. Terror attacks. The World Trade Center no longer exists. What about other landmarks? Other incidents?

Even the new X-Men movie has San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge seriously mutilated. How symbolic is that? It might all be special effects now, but reality is never far away.

Sure they might be able to patch the levees around New Orleans. Sure they rebuilt the pancaked Nimitz Freeway death trap after the Loma Prieta quake in 1989 in the San Francsico Bay Area.

But think about life permanently without Internet access. Few of us, older people like myself in their 50s, are the only ones around who remember life without computers, without the Internet.

But younger people? And the MySpace generation that has never lived without a computer (or without the benefits of computers)? These people are hopeless, clueless, and vulnerable to a certain doom without the big, fat Internet nanny. These kids would die without their cell phones, much less computers and the Internet.

We’re all hooked up into it, more assuredly we bloggers, we self-assured people who dream of a magic life of unlimited riches in exchange for nonstop yammering online while the rest of the world is supposed to kiss our sacred high-tech hands.

Be careful. Be very careful. And be afraid. Be very afraid. Power to the farming poor, for they shall inherit the Internet-dead earth.

Don’t forget to tune up on your hunting and gardening skills. If the grid goes down, we all go down.

Just don’t get cocky, and thank God for each day we can communicate so freely and easily.