‘Twas the morning of October 25^th, people carried on with their lives, researching in labs, going to work, or getting ready for class. Everything seemed like an average weekday morning, well of course, until the internet died. With the sudden information blackout, like panic buys in a shortage, people searched for whatever online connection they could find that did not rely on KT’s broken internet. This incident made me reflect on my reliance on technology, being amazed and horrified at the same time about how much we rely on the internet for so many things, until it came to me, can we actually live without the internet?

This whole “break-free-from-technology-return-to-nature” reminded me of Walden, written in 1854 by Henry David Thoreau, which argued for solitude, self-reliance, and simplicity away from the urban background back to nature. Thoreau wrote his own experience with living away from society for more than two years and noted the importance of pausing our busy lives and appreciating nature. Now if this was the 19^th century, moving away from cities to become independent from all the monotonous and repetitive social connections would be easier. Learning how to be self-sufficient in nature may be hard, but with the right teacher, it is nonetheless doable with patience and effort. But does that apply for us in the 21^st century, too? 

Let me imagine a day without my cell phone and internet. I wake up late in the afternoon without my phone alarm. Without the internet, I can’t even take classes with these online classes, so I move on to assignments. My assignments take forever for me to complete as all I can refer to are my textbooks and notes. Now I have some free time and I finished the book that I was reading. I want to know if there are other books by the same author so I decide to head towards the nearest bookstore that I know of. I try to catch a taxi only to realize all my cards are registered on Samsung Pay. I try to get a physical copy of my card at the bank, only to hear that I need my phone to verify it’s me. You get the gist of it. It is impossible to live in modern society without our cell phone or the internet.

Then how about a completely disconnected life, exactly as Thoreau did? I could go into the wilds and learn how to gather food or farm them — except it’s impossible to learn how to do that without the information on the internet. We can’t even disconnect from the internet unless we use the internet. Leading to a catch-22 of us needing the internet to not use the internet.

Just a decade ago, it might have been possible to live without the internet, when people still used magazines, newspapers, and television as the main source of news and information. Cell phone technology was not as developed as today, so their only function was text and calls. Today, we can’t even eat at a restaurant without our QR -code for COVID-19 tracking. We can’t listen to classes or hand in our assignments without the internet. We’ve entered an age where the internet is so integral to our society that we cannot separate the two. The internet is our society and our society is the internet. Science-fiction authors write about dystopian societies where technology was so ingrained in it that the said society could not function without the technology. But this is no dystopia. Yes, we are now more exposed to the dangers of the internet more than ever, but humanity has always persevered. We will find ways to minimize the dangers and the over-dependency through more technology and regulations, and the internet will become a part of what defines a human society. And after all of that, we will worry about the next big technology that will be so important to our lives we can’t live without.