The Day We Quit The Internet.
What would happen if humanity just quit the internet? Sort of. How might it come about? What might it look like?
It was January 30th 2029, a day the news media called “The Great Quit.” The day humanity quit the internet. Mostly. We didn’t stop using the internet entirely, but enough of it that it seemed to have become some sort of digital wasteland to many. It was as if some switch had been flicked. Everyone woke up, packed their collective digital suitcases and headed out, never to return.
Oddly enough, humans have a long history of packing up their bags and moving to greener pastures, or at least as far away from a society or place they no longer liked.
A prime example is the Kwakiutl from Canada’s Northwest Coast in what is now British Columbia, who were sedentary in the winter months and split into small, more mobile groups in the summer. They operated decentralized polities, much like today’s Web3 ideas.
While it would take sociologists and anthropologists some time to figure out exactly why we all just sort of quit the internet, the deeper reasons at least, plenty of pundits weighed in. Economic and business models collapsed they suggested, others that oppressive government regulations made running a social media platform too difficult. Some that AI was simply too expensive to run at the hoped for scale.
Some suggested it was something similar to the 1518 dance plague in the French city of Strasbourg where people literally danced themselves to death. Fortunately we didn’t die on that day. It happened in other places as well. We’re still not entirely sure why these happened, or if they’re all quite true. We sort of had a collective hysteria. This was like a global scale groupthink. Just not dysfunctional.
But the early clues were there for The Great Quit Sales of smartphones had plummeted by late 2027, with sales of feature phones, dumphones some called them, skyrocketing. TikTok, after it lost it’s appeal to be banned in the U.S. and subsequent bans in other Western democracies, all but collapsed. A telecom giant had bought the assets in the U.S. but failed to make it work.
By early 2028, Facebook had gone the way of Myspace. X had been sold off, renamed back to Twitter and just, well, fizzled. Reddit was still around, but it’s traffic had plummeted as well. Instagram had a brief reprise with the fall of TikTok, but it too, wasn’t seeing the traffic it used to.
Google, despite employing many brilliant minds, had become a place where people used its maps and Workspace products, but search had been buried under a tsunami of AI generated content. It simply could not keep up with the spam. Bing and Yahoo! too suffered a similar fate.
People had shifted over to privacy search engines, VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) had taken off in popularity. Over 30 American states, the EU, Canada and a number of other countries had enacted Right to Block legislation, giving people the right to block any form of advertising via their browsers, email and other apps, with a caveat for news media sites.
Yet news media sites started to thrive again. No longer beholden to programmatic ad networks and auctions, they could charge more for their ads. Journalism began to regain its status. Long-form writing had again become popular and platforms like Medium and Substack grew in popularity as well.
Many governments had implemented various forms of digital identity systems, much the same as a passport or government issued identification. The governments didn’t collect data on it’s citizens, it was just a snippet of code that confirmed a person, was, well, a real human being. To use a social media platform, and just about any online service, you had to be verified. Cybercrime and trolls almost collapsed overnight.
Right to repair and the right to integrate acts had swept around the world. The quality of technology products from farming equipment to toaster ovens rapidly increased. DIY repair videos were all the rage on video platforms. Video shorts however, weren’t as popular anymore.
The promise of AI agents that would be our personal assistants never quite came into reality. The tech giants had tried, but as it turned out, people just weren’t that interested and there wasn’t enough that were to keep those businesses open. By early 2026, the shine had worn off, the bubble collapsed and Generative AI tools were in a bit of a winter.
The anticipated loss of millions of jobs hadn’t come to be. As businesses struggled to find workers, wages rose. A four day work week had seeped into most economies around the world. People were out doing things. Selfies became a sort of social taboo.
Far from rejecting Artificial Intelligence (AI) though, AI just found its way into more useful places and applications. Better materials such as lightweight but super strong metals that combined with other materials were invented. Car crashes were nasty bumps, but the metals used meant the cars didn’t crush.
The way we used the internet had begun to change significantly by 2027. We still used it to shop, but a couple of clever companies invented AI agents that people liked because they negotiated deals with eCommerce websites and cheap products sort of faded away.
We still booked our flights, hotels and rentals, but common standards through IEEE and ISO had ended up with a standardized, easy to use interface and systems. The right to integrate platforms as well as farming equipment and other hardware, made it all possible with a little backend help from AI. The best use of AI it turned out, was doing boring things in the background of our lives.
By late 2028, most of the major social media platforms traffic had dropped by 90%, none could pull in enough ad revenue to be profitable. Privacy and data laws enacted around the world along with digital identities meant that consumers and citizens controlled their own data. No longer could social media platforms or any digital business, just randomly collect data and create profiles on people. It was the end of surveillance capitalism.
Governments, working through the United Nations, had created a web portal where, with ones verified digital identity, a person could instantly check what information a company had collected on them and what their profile was. And they could change degrees of access and even accept payments for use of their data.
Blockchain technology had evolved to where it could be effectively used at scale and issues such as 51% attacks had largely been solved. A system where news media sites, accredited through government agencies and citizen groups working together, meant fake news sites and misinformation tactics became almost impossible to work.
By 2026, the scandals around programmatic advertising scams in the digital ad industry, along with several high profile law suits as global brands realized they were losing upwards of 60% of their ad spend to scams saw the whole system collapse.
A sort of group nostalgia combined with a sociocultural shift had been underway since the mid 2020’s and by the end of the decade, culture, always the final arbiter of technology, had reshaped the technologies that had, for over three decades, shaped it.
While this is all hypothetical and a bit of fun, there are some indicators of how culture is beginning to redefine the role of some technologies. How we will react to and evolve the role of AI is still very much in the opening days. Social media is changing however, with regulatory and societal pressures. Google is already facing a daunting task, same as Microsoft. Search is changing. Some interesting years are ahead of us.