In my opinion, a global internet collapse makes a great YouTube thumbnail, but not a realistic scenario. The network is too distributed, too redundant, and too patched‑together to fail all at once.
What is fragile isn’t the infrastructure — it’s the people who assume the infrastructure is magic. Pull the plug for a week and you don’t get utopia or collapse. You get:
– banks dusting off their offline procedures
– stores running cash‑only
– people rediscovering that their phone is also a telephone
– and yes, fewer freaks yelling at each other
The “freaks” don’t vanish offline. They just show up in different places, usually louder.