KQED58%
Are We Doomed If The Internet Goes Dark? 35%
By Morgan Sung45% Chris Egusa46% Maya Cueva45% Ana De Almeida Amaral33% Chris Hambrick45%
7/15/2026, 10:00:18 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 39 faulty reasoning types, including Availability Heuristic, Optimism Bias, and Appeal to Emotion, with Hasty Generalization as the most egregious example at 15.7% saturation with 920 hits. Analysis detected 8,684 faulty-reasoning hits from 5,871 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 42.6% and a BS Rank of 35% (10,411 of 15,985 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 65.10% of the article peer group.
What are the chances that the internet could go down forever?
How bad for humanity would it be if it did?
And what would a shift back to the before-times look like?
These are the kinds of questions “doom reporter” Ben Bradford tries to answer in his new podcast, Are We Doomed?
Morgan and Ben discuss the scenarios that might lead to a long-term internet outage — from severed undersea cables to a massive solar storm.
And they tackle the most pressing question of all: will influencers survive the internet apocalypse?
Guest:
Ben Bradford, journalist and host of Are We Doomed?
Further Reading/Listening:
Are We Doomed? — Ben Bradford, Are We Doomed?
We Try and Kill the Internet — Ben Bradford, Are We Doomed?
Amazon Explains How Its AWS Outage Took Down the Web – Matt Burgess and Lily Hay Newman, WIRED
The AWS Outage Bricked People’s $2,700 Smartbeds – Matthew Gault, 404 Media
Complex Structure Supported by a Tiny Part – Know Your Meme
A Stealth Attack Came Close to Compromising the World’s Computers – The Economist
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Episode Transcript
This is a computer-generated transcript.
While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.
Morgan Sung: Do you like these deep dives?
Whether you call yourself a Tabby or a Tab Head or part of the Tab Hive, if you’re a fan of Close All Tabs, it would be so, so helpful if you could rate and review the show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you’re listening to us.
Under our watch, every tab in the land will be closed, eventually.
I mean, I have like 15 open right now.
Okay, let’s get to the show
Morgan Sung: Okay, not to brag, but last year Close All Tabs won a pretty special award, the Media Literate Media Award from NAML.
That’s the National Association for Media Literacy.
According to them, we’ve helped listeners better understand the internet, which is pretty cool.
Ben Bradford, a veteran public radio journalist, also won the award.
I recently talked with him, and obviously had to bring it up.
Well, thanks so much for joining us, Ben.
Um, to start off, we both received NAMLE awards at the same time, which means that our takes are always correct.
We are so media literate.
Ben Bradford: That’s exactly right.
We- it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s been proven.
We’re credentialed.
Morgan Sung: Exactly.
I have a little plaque that says, “My takes are always correct.”
Ben has long been fascinated by politics and history and climate and disaster, which means he spends a lot of time thinking about the end of the world.
And now he’s launched a new project.
Ben Bradford: My name is Ben Bradford, and I am the creator and host of a new podcast that’s called Are We Doomed?, which is the cheery title for a show about the end of the world.
And we look at practical threats to society and to humanity.
We look at internet hysteria.
We look at, like, our pop culture obsession with the end of the world, and try to find some hope in the darkness.
And I think that we actually do that, which has been very fun.
Morgan Sung: Today, we’re actually doing something a little different than our usual deep dives.
You see, Are We Doomed?
recently explored my personal doomsday scenario.
What happens if the internet goes out forever?
This would really suck for Close All Tabs, a show that literally revolves around the internet.
It would also suck for me, someone who’s built an entire career around covering the online world.
But this also goes way deeper than just a job.
There are so many habits ingrained in my life that depend on internet access.
I’m not talking mindless scrolling.
I mean daily functions, like LA earthquake Twitter
I live in Los Angeles, so does Ben, and every time there’s even the slightest rumble afoot, I run straight to social media to check if it was indeed an earthquake.
Despite its name, the concept of LA earthquake Twitter transcends a single social media platform.
It’s the communal experience of everyone in Southern California going online to see if anyone else felt that rumble.
Was that an earthquake?
Most of the time it’s not, but there have been times when some earthquake hobbyist on social media confirms it before any news outlet does.
Ben Bradford: The earthquake one is funny ’cause I definitely do that, and I also get… You know how people get phantom vibrations for their phone-
Morgan Sung: Yeah
Ben Bradford: where they think that their phone is buzzing?
Morgan Sung: Yeah.
Ben Bradford: I think I get that for earthquakes.
I don’t know if you ever get that- Yeah … where I’m like, “Man, was that an earthquake?”
Morgan Sung: But, you know, how will I ever be sure if, if I can’t check Twitter?
Ben Bradford: You need it
Morgan Sung: This isn’t a frivolous concern, okay?
The entire infrastructure of modern warning systems relies on internet connection.
For minor shakes, I’ll run to LA Earthquake Twitter, but if a big one’s coming, I’ll probably get a push alert from ShakeAlert first.
That’s the West Coast Earthquake Warning System.
It calculates the magnitude of potential earthquakes and where they might hit, and then automatically sends alerts to that area, which trigger safety actions like slowing down trains, shutting off elevators, and turning on hospital generators, and hopefully with enough time to get people to safety.
But to do all that, ShakeAlert gathers data from a sprawling network of sensors transmitted electronically online.
The algorithms that figure out if an earthquake is actually dangerous process from the cloud.
And to actually send this information to people, obviously the system needs the internet.
Internet connection is baked into every step of the process.
It’s why the very concept of the internet going dark is such a terrifying doomsday event.
Ben Bradford: We have become so reliant on this very complicated technology, and that happens in various ways throughout human history.
I think we can safely say there has not been one as complicated, and that requires so many other things to keep running.
I mean, you know, from, uh, electricity to infrastructure to software.
Morgan Sung: As a self-described doom reporter, this kept Ben up at night.
LA Earthquake Twitter and the complex warning system behind it is just one example.
The infrastructure of society is internet based.
Our drinking water processing sites, our food supply chains, our hospital equipment, these all rely on systems that can only function with internet access.
So for his podcast, Are We Doomed?, Ben looked into it.
I said we’re doing things a little differently for this one, right?
Today, Ben and I are both going to take you on a deep dive as we attempt to get to the bottom of some questions you might be asking yourself right now.
Has the internet ever gone dark before?
What kind of doomsday scenarios are we looking at here?
Could we survive?
And the question I was dying to ask, how likely is this really?
Buckle up.
This is Close All Tabs.
I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist, and your chronically online friend here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives.
Let’s get into it.
Okay, let’s open our first tab.
How important is the internet to our lives?
Just like my fear of losing LA earthquake Twitter, this question feels frivolous.
But like the warning system behind it, losing the internet will cut a lot deeper than you might think.
Ben Bradford: And so then the question becomes, one, how reliant are we actually?
What ability do we have to roll back if this thing were to leave us, and not for an inconvenient couple of hours, not for a day, but for longer?
And then two, is there a way for that to happen?
Morgan Sung: Yeah.
So you actually looked at a real world, um, case study of this that took place in northern Arizona in 2015.
What happened there?
Ben Bradford: So 2015, the internet went out in Flagstaff and surrounding areas, and it is an interesting case study because of just how many things suddenly didn’t work and what people could figure out how to do and what they couldn’t figure out how to do.
Morgan Sung: Here’s an excerpt from this episode of Are We Doomed?
Ben Bradford: Northern Arizona, TV screens cut out.
ATMs broke down.
Credit card readers, gone.
Cell phone service, gone. 911, jammed.
Banks, courthouses, bars, you name it, in disarray
What had happened was this big internet cable that delivers internet to that area of Arizona had been cut by copper thieves probably looking for copper wire.
And so it’s sort of a small vulnerability.
The cable’s just out there.
It stretches hundreds of miles.
You go, you saw in, you take the copper, and it has this really dramatic effect.
Morgan Sung: From emergency services to sewer systems, it became clear that this one cable was foundational to the infrastructure that kept northern Arizona going.
One reporter called it the area’s digital umbilical cord.
This outage only lasted half a day and affected a 100-mile stretch of communities.
It makes me wonder, what if the internet went down for the whole world, and it lasted much longer, even forever?
Okay, but the situation in Arizona happened over 10 years ago.
Surely society as a whole has learned from that experience and developed better backup plans since then, right?
Ben Bradford: So this is one of the questions that we looked at and didn’t thrill me because I don’t think that I loved the answers to it.
As we embrace the internet more as a fundamental technology, and we build more things on top of it, we, we do simply have less backups.
And so I remember talking to a friend of mine, I just pinged him while I was working on a story.
Um, he’s the medical director in an emergency department at a major hospital, and I said, “Hey, if the internet went down, and not for a day, but for a while, what would it mean for you?”
And he said, “We’d be out of luck.”
That’s how we submit prescriptions.
That is how we look up patients.
That’s how we transfer them between places.”
And so it’s funny because hospitals have backup generators, but they don’t have a backup internet.
Morgan Sung: I’m thinking of that scene in The Pit when, uh, the hospital systems go down because of a cyber attack and-
Ben Bradford: Yeah
Morgan Sung: all these doctors have to suddenly go back to clipboards and charting by hand and, like, reading manual, uh, test results.
[Clip from The Pitt]: This is how we rolled when I was a resident.
Was that in the 1900s?
Yeah, when charts were written by candlelight.
Ben Bradford: The part of it that I think is sort of fascinating is just how expansive that question becomes.
Things that surprised me are, like, the degree to which our water treatment centers rely on network connectivity.
There are reports that have been written, federal government inspector general reports or GAO reports, that look at the vulnerability of water treatment centers to cyber attacks, for instance, and that’s not great.
Uh, you would prefer that your water not be hacked, and I don’t know that we wanna create a system where we rely on our water where it’s vulnerable to hacking.
Like, that’s sort of a strange thing.
Uh- Well, who thought?
Totally, and then it becomes, okay, in our sort of galaxy brain scenario where the whole internet goes down or this technology just becomes unfeasible, it’s like, yeah, your drinking water is degraded, if available at all, and that’s pretty wild.
And it depends on the area that you’re in, and there’s some nuance to that, but it shows the extent to what we’re looking at here.
Morgan Sung: Yeah.
So it seems like a lot of these scenarios that we’ve talked about, the fictional one in The Pit or, you know-
Ben Bradford: Yeah …
Morgan Sung: the one in Arizona, like, all these scenarios have an end date or an end time.
Like, they will come to an end and that’s comforting.
But in the event that the whole world’s internet does go dark, I mean, what would happen?
Like, genuinely, would we die without the internet?
Ben Bradford: So I can’t predict the- … the future or the hypothetical of it, but I will say that I think it would be massively disruptive for a longer amount of time than we might think.
Morgan Sung: When it comes to survival, the main questions are over food and water.
Our food system is incredibly reliant on the internet.
Crops don’t rely on the internet to grow, but the cargo shipping systems that get that food into our grocery stores do, and these systems also send necessary supplies to the farms that grow our food.
All of these systems rely on the internet and our ability to communicate through it.
Ben Bradford: And while I am confident in humanity’s resilience and cleverness in being able to figure out workarounds, I think that the massive scale of the disruption, I mean, what it would do just to basically to money, you know, your stock market crashes, um, people can’t get access to their money.
How often are you looking at paper bills, and what would those do for you in that world where so many other aspects of the financial system are down?
You start to get into this real hard-to-imagine world, right?
But if you start kind of taking those individual pieces of hospitals and water treatment centers and the supply chain, and you add it all together, you get something that looks pretty dystopian and a lot like an apocalypse movie.
So that is, I think, what you’re dealing with in the near term if the internet goes down and doesn’t come back.
Morgan Sung: Yeah, I mean, I’m gonna be honest, it’s really hard to not, like, hear this and then, want to, I don’t know, buy baby goat to move to Ohi, which is- Right.
Yeah … like the furthest, most rural place I can imagine.
Like-
Ben Bradford: Yes.
Morgan Sung: Before Ben and I get you all worked up into a panic, take a breath.
Humanity survived for thousands of years before the internet, and if we had to, we could do it again, even if I personally would really rather not.
We’re gonna dive into these offline doomsday scenarios after a quick break, but first, we wanted to remind you that Close All Tabs depends on listeners like you to keep us going.
You can support us by becoming a member at donate.kqed.org/podcasts.
Okay, after the break, could the internet really go down for good?
Welcome back.
Let’s open a new tab.
Could the internet go dark forever?
I posed this question to Ben, and if it’s any small comfort, he says it’s actually a lot harder to make that happen than you might think, and that’s because of the way this physical infrastructure is built.
You know how we call it the World Wide Web?
The phrase is actually kind of literal.
There are these undersea cables that span all across the globe.
Ben Bradford: It is this sort of spider web connecting all the different continents in different ways, and the internet runs through all of them.
If you cut one, the software of the internet figures out how to reroute the information.
So when you think about Northern Arizona, that happens to be one area where there was sort of a choke point, one sort of big pipe connecting the internet to that region, and there are other places like that.
We saw several years ago a volcanic eruption in the ocean, uh, near Tonga.
An undersea volcano blew through the ocean’s floor.
Smoke and ash erupted into the sky.
The force of the explosion unleashed a devastating tsunami, and that explosion also ripped through the underwater cable that delivers internet to Tonga.
Without communication, other countries struggled to provide relief.
Tongans couldn’t access outside money.
Much of the nation relies on remittances from family off the islands.
Those stopped.
In that case, it was a natural disaster that cut off Tonga from the internet.
But people do attack undersea cables, and it’s hard to prove sabotage, although countries are constantly accusing each other, because the cables are unprotected, innocent, perfect for attack.
It was another sort of look at just how disruptive this kind of thing can be.
So internet cables being severed can be a problem, but because the internet is decentralized and because the software is designed to find where it’s not working and then reroute, it’s generally not that big of a problem.
One pipe goes down, and you can repair it.
And so Tonga was sort of like the worst-case scenario of that, and even then, the pipe gets repaired relatively quickly, and there are some workarounds you can put in place in the meantime.
Morgan Sung: During the Cold War, technologists started thinking about how to build a telecommunication system that could survive nuclear war.
Ben Bradford: Legend goes that the internet was built off of that, and so that’s that sort of decentralized network.
One part goes down, and you imagine a spiderweb with, like, electricity running through it.
Electricity runs through all the spiderweb, but one little tendril of spiderweb gets severed, and the electricity still courses through the rest of it, and that’s essentially how information flows through the internet.
So even if you were to go and sever a lot of the undersea cables, it would be a problem.
It would create slowdowns, but any places that the pipes were still running to would still work.
Morgan Sung: That is comforting, simply cutting the cables connecting our world wouldn’t instantly doom us.
But there is another theory of an event that could fry our internet, solar storms.
Solar storms are sudden bursts of energy from the sun with enough radiation that could affect our planet’s electrical systems.
This has actually already happened on Earth in 1859.
Ben Bradford: If you go back to the 1850s, the biggest technology of the day was the telegraph, and there was this event– it’s called the Carrington Event.
All of a sudden, around the world, telegraph machines start going crazy.
Telegraph stations in some cases are lighting on fire because they’re overloading.
People are unplugging their telegraphs, and the telegraphs are still chattering away, and they don’t know what’s happening, right?
They think they’re possessed.
The night sky lit up like it was daytime.
Some people thought it was daytime, and so they went to church.
Uh, it was a solar storm.
It was the biggest solar storm that we’ve had in recorded history
Morgan Sung: And since 1859, we have become much more reliant on electricity.
Ben Bradford: There are some questions about if we were to be hit with an equivalent event to that one back when there was telegraph, how well the internet would stand up.
Like that seems to me like the best thing to blow out the hardware of the internet.
But we have a government office called the Space Weather Center.
It’s part of the, uh, National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration.
You have utilities that are starting to take that threat more seriously.
So you have some work being done, and I think the hope would be that by the time we have another one of those events, that we’re prepared.
Morgan Sung: So from what you’ve been telling me, it sounds like the internet is actually a lot more resilient than you might think, than the, the doomsday people might be worried about.
Ben Bradford: I feel really good about it.
The two things that I worry about are, um, I think that there are some software vulnerabilities.
There’s a famous, uh, web comic, uh, from XKCD.
It’s, it’s Randall Munroe, who’s a former NASA rocket scientist, and just is, just absolutely brilliant, and he does these web comics.
And there’s a very famous one that he does about the internet.
Morgan Sung: It’s titled Dependency.
So this image shows a drawing of a giant intricate tower of blocks stacked in increasingly complicated ways as you move toward the top.
Above it, there’s text that says, “All modern digital infrastructure.”
This is like Jenga from hell.
At the bottom is a comically thin block holding up all the others.
The caption says, “A project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003.”
The artist posted Dependency in 2020, and it’s become a meme among software engineers who edit the tower higher and higher with even more precarious blocks.
Like, there’s this one edit that has the blocks off-kilter, balanced on a lever labeled AI.
The tiny block propping up the whole tower is labeled unpaid open source developers, while an angry bird flies toward the structure, ready to topple it over.
That one is labeled whatever Microsoft is doing.
The point is the internet as we know it is this tower, cobbled together, perpetually built upon by hobbyists doing it for free and companies that have their own agenda.
Ben Bradford: And so if people were to identify those particular things, you could potentially knock them out and have unforeseen outages.
Now, would that outage create, you know, the endless lack of internet?
It seems like probably not.
And it seems like people are clever and people are really good at hacking things in.
But that’s one of the other vulnerabilities that we saw.
Morgan Sung: And it seems like it doesn’t necessarily need to be some kind of bad actor going after that one thing a guy built in his basement in 2003 to take down huge parts of the internet.
You know, I’m thinking of the AWS outage last year.
Okay, for listeners, AWS, or Amazon Web Services, it’s the cloud computing platform that pretty much everyone uses.
It’s the backbone of the internet.
Last year, a DNS error brought it all down.
DNS, domain name system.
It’s the way the internet translates names to numbers, like translating the human language into one computers can understand.
Some call DNS the phone book of the internet.
Imagine all the contacts in your phone get wiped out, but your whole job is making calls.
You’re the cog that keeps your whole machine running.
So without your phone book, everything comes grinding to a halt.
This led to a cascading comedy of errors that brought down, like, entire chunks of the internet.
Like Ring cameras were down, online banking services went dark, my Roomba wouldn’t turn on because it couldn’t-
Ben Bradford: Your Roomba?
Morgan Sung: My Roomba actually went down.
Ben Bradford: Yeah, obviously you can’t vacuum if you can’t use the internet.
Morgan Sung: No.
Well, even worse, it kept turning on and then getting lost, and then trying to get back to its dock, but it couldn’t find anything, and I was like, “Stop turning on.”
Ben Bradford: What’d you do?
Morgan Sung: I literally turned it upside down like a bug.
Oh my God.
It was so annoying.
Um, people’s smart beds went down and suddenly changed to, like, 100 degrees overnight, or it s- automatically set alarms off-Mm-hmm … in the middle of the night.
It, it’s like parts of society just kind of came to a halt because of this one bug.
Ben Bradford: People have apartments they can’t get into, uh- Literally … unless there’s network connectivity.
It… Literally, it’s like our whole lives are, like, smart devices now.
Morgan Sung: In the event of a real doomsday scenario, what does last year’s AWS outage tell us about society’s ability to function without even parts of the internet?
Ben Bradford: Right.
I mean, I think that that, again, is one of those examples that shows two sides of what we’re talking about here.
It shows the level of disruption, and it also shows some of those pain points.
Experts worry about the centralization of the internet because that becomes a potential vulnerability where one company goes down, one company has a bug like Amazon, and all of a sudden nothing works.
Well, that has only continued to build because 10, 15 years ago, if you were starting a business and it related in any way to the internet, you would buy your own servers, and you would usually host your own servers.
But companies began to offer cloud services, and only a few companies are the big ones.
AWS, Google has one, Oracle has one, and that is where almost all businesses now reside.
So now you’ve again got this sort of larger vulnerability, and there’s a lot of security that they have, but things can go wrong ’cause they’re complicated.
So the AWS outage is such a good example of that, and it shows you the reach that just that one company has in over all kinds of other things that we wouldn’t think are connected.
Morgan Sung: It was a stark reminder that entire swaths of the internet depend on just a handful of tech giants.
This centralization is not ideal when one of those companies has a problem, like a tiny block propping up a precarious and ever-growing tower of digital infrastructure.
One vulnerability could cause it to all come tumbling down.
Ben Bradford: The only other element that I wonder if we should talk about at all when we talk about the, the software side of things is, of course, like the big new player here is AI.
You’ve got something like, you know, Claude Mythos, which has been hyped up as something that can find vulnerabilities that nobody has found in software.
And I think that there is a question of as AI continues to advance, if this is a thing that seems to be good at, it seems to be good at coding, it seems to be useful for that, can it help people find more vulnerabilities?
Does that add to our vulnerability on the software side?
And I don’t think we know yet, but I mean, certainly to me as doom reporter guy, I’m like, that doesn’t seem ideal.
Morgan Sung: Okay, we’ve talked about the ways the internet could feasibly be taken down, whether it’s a solar storm or a software bug.
What would the world look like if it really did go down for good, if we were all forced offline and had to figure out how to make it work?
Let’s open one more tab, Surviving the Internet Apocalypse.
The practical reality of like, oh, if the internet goes down, like we’ve talked about, it’s so much more deeply embedded in every aspect of like society and culture and our lives.
What would a return to the before times actually look like?
Is there any going back?
Ben Bradford: So I think that, uh, in some ways it’s like we’ve done it before, we could do it again.
And we have examples from history of civilizations collapsing where the whole, again, sort of supply chain of a massive area of the world fell apart.
And not to be the guy that talks about Rome, um, but that is one example, I’m sorry.
Uh, where, you know, you had this sort of kind of incredible amount of trade going around the Mediterranean, supply chains that really, you know, brought things from the Middle East all the way to Europe and back, and that falls apart.
And places figured out how to continue to survive, and they became less reliant on large trade routes.
So I think that if the internet, which is this big connector of societies, fell apart, we would figure it out.
It probably would require some reliance on figuring out how to go local.
Uh, it would present some major challenges.
I think that like it’s hard to understate the level of challenges it would create because I do think things like figuring out how to get food to the places, figuring out how to get the things that grow the food to the right places is all a major challenge and a disruption for a matter of months, even if we could ultimately circumvent that, would be an issue.
But I’m pretty confident we’d figure it out.
If you ever camping and you’re in an area where your phone doesn’t get service, really quickly you put your phone away, and you kind of forget about it, and it becomes a non-issue because it’s just not there anymore.
Whether we’re talking about Doom or we’re talking about just like everyday tasks, people kind of live their lives with what’s available to them.
So I think that that would be true in an internet-less world.
I think it would be true in a powerless world, a world where there wasn’t electricity.
All of those would be less comfortable.
All of them would be worse in certain ways.
I’m not rooting for any of those.
But yeah, I have kind of like good optimism in humanity’s ability to, to figure those things out, just not without suffering.
I am wondering, like from your perspective, like, you know, you are a tech reporter, you are much more immersed in this side of things, and I’m just wondering, you know, what struck you about this story, if anything, that I might not have thought of?
Morgan Sung: You know, it’s funny, I, I started out reporting on the creator economy and memes and like influencers.
Like That was kind of like the first jobs I had.
I did have this thought of like, okay, society collapses, will influencers continue influencing?
Will they just become local, you know, town criers?
Ben Bradford: Sure.
Morgan Sung: Will they become the person who’s like in the great market where everyone’s bartering again, where they’re like, “Everyone needs to get on this.”
Ben Bradford: yeah
Morgan Sung: I did have this thought of like, hmm, I bet, you know, all these current influencers and their ring lights, they’re gonna find a way.
Ben Bradford: We have an upcoming episode that looks at what a post-apocalypse might actually look like.
How would it be different from what we see in the films, and what would you actually need probably to survive a post-apocalypse?
And as far as we can tell, in historic events that resemble today’s apocalypse scenarios, some society totally fractured, massive death, whatever.
Um, I just said massive death whatever, and I regret that.
But, um- … you know, in real big tragic scenarios, people do not flee to their bunkers.
They come together and they reform communities.
So there are hard skills that seem to be useful like being able to grow food seems to be very useful.
But there’s an argument that we hear that the most useful thing is communication, that it’s leading people to be able to work together.
And I don’t know whether an influencer is like the best skill set to lead people and bring people together.
Ben Bradford: But certainly in terms of having an authoritative voice that people will listen to, that skill set might be really useful.
Yeah.
Morgan Sung: I mean, hey, I can’t wait till the apocalypse when we’re all just eating berries and someone’s like, “Oh, this berry’s the best one.
Believe me.”
Ben Bradford: This is the one.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Here’s why I use it.
Morgan Sung: Okay.
After all of this reporting, um, as the now voice of doom scenarios, in this kind of like, I don’t know, mental ranking that you have of like this is the worst thing that could happen, where does the internet going down worldwide fall in that?
Ben Bradford: It is not high up on the list of things that I worry about.
It is an example of a black swan event, something that essentially is not in any planning, that we consider to be sort of impregnable.
So I think it’s worth considering from the perspective of what if it’s not?
So this one feels very solvable.
It feels to me like a thing that people are thinking about to some extent, that we could take more seriously, that we should consider, but that we shouldn’t be like stressing about.
Morgan Sung: So yes, the internet going down is a possible doomsday event, but the likelihood of it happening is comparatively low compared to other apocalyptic scenarios, and if it does happen, we’ll figure out ways to survive it.
That being said, Ben, as a doomsday reporter, thinks about this stuff a lot, and there are a few situations that do seriously worry him.
The big four, according to him: AI, nuclear war, climate change, pandemics.
But those last three are way out of my scope of a deep dive.
To hear more about those scenarios, you should check out Are We Doomed?
You can find it wherever you get your podcasts.
We’ll link to Ben’s episode about killing the internet, and some useful reading, if you’re interested in opening even more tabs about this.
And as usual, if you’re really that hungry for more, you can stick around after the credits for some bonus content.
Okay, but for now, let’s close all these tabs
Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung.
This episode was produced by Ana De Almeida Amaral and Chris Egusa.
It was edited by Chris Egusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music.
The Close All Tabs team also includes producer Maya Cueva, editor Chris Hambrick, and audio engineer Brendan Willard.
Additional music by APM.
Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad.
Jen Chien is our director of podcasts, and Ethan Toven Lindsay is our editor-in-chief.
Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco Northern California Local.
This episode’s keyboard sounds were submitted by Alex Tran and recorded on his white Epomaker Hi75 keyboard with Fogruaden red samurai keycaps and gateron milky yellow pro v2 switches.
Thanks for listening.
Ben Bradford: Also, by the way, because we’re both running podcasts, uh, the fact that there is no podcast without the internet because that’s the way audio is shared… that seems like a big problem for both of us.
Morgan Sung: I’m, you know, I think out of habit if the internet went down, I would just be, like, alone in my closet talking into a hairbrush, you know?
Ben Bradford: Right.
That’s bleak.
Analysis
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