The World Of Tomorrow (If They Shut Off The Internet)
United States Senator and occasional Villain Joe Lieberman recently proposed a bill which would grant the President the power to shut down the Internet. This so called "kill switch" would be used to protect U.S. national interests in the event of some kind of Internet emergency, presumably something to do with Skynet or some kind of super Napster. Controversially, this kill switch could be activated unilaterally, regardless of the harm done to businesses or private users in the U.S. and around the world. Obviously the implications of such a plan are frightening, and it would be irresponsible for Cracked not to haphazardly slap together an article which farts around the main issues and infuriates people with its cavalier attitude. We take our lack of responsibility seriously.
To best analyze the implications of this hilarious violation of our rights, we decided that the best thing to do would be to send me, Cracked's hardiest writer, through time, to visit a future where this kill switch had been created and activated. This kind of solution is actually pretty straight forward for Cracked, as we've had access to an operating time machine since 1915, when Cracked family scion Theodore Krakt (and his friend Bill) were visited by a time traveler from the future, who provided them with a time traveling phone booth to help them pass an important history test. We don't use it much though, partly because our powers (making references to 80s toys) are nearly useless in every era other than this one, but also because nearly every person who has stepped foot in it has ended up murdering their grandfather.
Down in the basement of the Cracked Labs I found the phone booth under a pile of back issues of one of our failed magazines. Digging it out, I stepped in, took a deep breath, and inserted a quarter. Punching 2014 into the dial pad, I closed the door and waited. A loud *FLUP* sound announced the opening of the Orifice of Time, and seconds later the phone booth confidently dropped through it. Shortly thereafter, I arrived at my destination, the year 2014. I opened the door cautiously and took a sniff of the air. The odor of burning flesh--but less strong than usual for L.A. Was something wrong?
Creeping up the stairs, I entered the lobby of Cracked Tower. Half of the windows were blasted out, the wind howling through them spookily. Clearly something awful had happened here. I mean, something really awful--twice as awful as the awful things we regularly engineered to happen here. Behind me, the sound of crunching glass. I turned, startled, to see a weary man wearing a beard which looked like it was attacking and subsuming a smaller beard.
"Dan? Dan O'Brien? Is that you?" I asked, staring at him.
He returned my gaze with a look best described as "glassy," before shaking his head. "My name is Xavier. Xavier Thrust. I'm the Chief Editor of Cracked."
"I'm sorry. It's just that you look a lot like Dan O'Brien."
He nodded. "I should. Dan O'Brien was my father."
"Your father!" I blurted, stunned. "What year is this? I thought I set that thing to 2014."
"It is 2014."
"But how?"
"It's The Future. Technology." He waved his hands and fingers in front of my face in a manner which he apparently believed to represent technology. "There've been many changes. You wouldn't understand. Come with me Bucholz. We've been waiting for you."
Xavier led me upstairs to Cracked's main office. The place was a mess. A handful of harried looking people I didn't recognize roamed the halls. There was sadness in their eyes... no, something else. They all looked like they were holding in farts. In one office I saw a man repeatedly throwing a banana peel on the floor and staring at it. In another, I could see an anvil sitting on the middle of a desk, while two men walked around it taking notes.
"What's going on here?"
"This is what Cracked does now." Xavier replied. "We're trying to reinvent comedy with the scraps of information we have that survived the fall of the Internet."
"So the kill switch actually happened in this future?"
Xavier nodded. "The kill switch legislation passed in late 2010, and the system implemented over the next year. In 2012, during the grand opening ceremony, it was "accidentally" triggered by Senator Lieberman, shutting down the Internet. Due to a fault in the system, the whole thing couldn't be restarted for several weeks, during which time the world tried, and failed, to adjust."
"What, you started killing each other with sticks and rocks?" I quipped.
"Ha ha ha! Hey, fuck you, caveman. Are you listening to my story or not?" Xavier snapped at me. I nodded sheepishly. I guess making jokes about a bunch of people dying in front of someone who had watched a bunch of those people die was poor form. Something to remember.
Xavier continued his story. "Imagine taking someone from the dampest corners of the Internet--let's say, Xbox Live--and then throwing them out into the real world. These people, these demi-humans, were completely harmless so long as they were tucked away in the armpit of reality. But then the Internet was shut off, and they began crawling out of their foul nests and into the light. All of them. At once. And do you know what they did next?"
I considered that for a moment. "They started calling people fags?"
Xavier nodded. "They started calling people fags. Everyone. You don't even fucking know. Do you have any idea what it does to the social fabric to have millions of sociopaths suddenly appear out of nowhere, and show up in our parks and our stores and our Arby's, screaming 'DIE JEW DARKY COMMIE FAG!' at every single person they meet? Millions of them. 'I HOPE YOU SUCK A MILLION ASSES IN ACID YOU ESKIMO FUCKER.' I saw a guy yelling that at a crosswalk button. It was insane. There was chaos. There were riots."
I could easily imagine that. I'd been on Xbox Live once in my life, and had more than12 people tell me that they were going to find out where I lived and shit on my head and murder me. The only reason I was still alive was that none of these people had any motivation to actually leave their houses. If that changed...
"Martial law was declared. Which didn't go over too well. The government nearly fell. A lot of people ended up dying." Xavier looked at his feet. We'd reached the office which used to be Jack's. I noticed the large tombstone in the corner, with his name on it. My eyes welled up, a mixture of grief at the loss of a colleague and friend, and happiness, knowing that he would have been absolutely furious at the idea of being buried here.
Xavier sat down at Jack's desk and continued his story. "Eventually things settled down a bit. We've got a new government now. A slightly firmer government. It was decided that these riots were a sure sign that the Internet was a cancer of society. And like cancer, the only known treatments were harsh. Parents, all parents, were deemed unfit to raise their children. Every child in the country was relocated away from their parents to special child-rearing camps."
"And is this how you were born and grew up to be an adult in four years?"
Xavier sighed. "I don't really want to talk about that."
"No, no, no, I insist," I continued, staring him down as sympathetically as possible.
Xavier grimaced. "My father was at the Lawrence Livermore lab in Berkley researching an article on the Incredible Hulk, where he ended up having sex with a small nuclear reactor. I am the entirely predictable result."
"And when you say DOB was your father, does that mean?"
"Yes, he's dead. But not from that. He was actually quite famous for awhile because of that."
I nodded, easily imagining that.
"No, he died some time later. With mom."
"The nuclear reactor?"
"Yes," Xavier said through clenched teeth. "They were drinking... well I guess dad was trying to get her drunk." Xavier shook his head. "I don't know what happened. An explosion? A lot of people died. The police ended up calling it a 'domestic dispute' but I think they really didn't know what to make of it."
"I'm sorry," I said, falling off my chair laughing.
Xavier glared daggers at me. He really was a Cracked editor. "If I can continue?"
"Please do," I offered, clutching my sides. Xavier waited patiently until I retook my seat.
"Anyways, with order somewhat restored the government decided that the Internet was too much of a threat to start up again. Most other forms of technological entertainment were banned as well, or sharply regulated. Television, electric handjob machines, video games. The only thing even resembling a video game any more are horrible 'Edutainment' creations. The world's leading software developer is now PBS."
I shuddered. "This government. Is this thing elected, or what? How does that work now?"
Xavier shook his head. "The riots forced Obama to postpone the election. He didn't really have a choice, but when it was delayed, well that just made things worse. That's when the government nearly fell. Supposedly we'll have elections again soon. That's what Uncle Joe says."
"You don't mean"
"Oh yeah."
"Oh wow. Sorry future, that's really shitty." I paused, thinking. "You said you were waiting for me? How?"
"When you left in the phone booth in 2010, we knew when and where you'd arrive. We've been anxiously awaiting your arrival for years."
I frowned. No one ever seemed to care when I was or wasn't in this office, much less eagerly await my return. "We're disappointed to see you Bucholz" was a phrase I recalled in particular. They put that on my birthday cake once. It wasn't even my birthday.
"And why were you waiting for me?"
"Because we know you can help. I'm sorry my father isn't here to ask you himself. I know you two were close."
I stared at him blankly.
"He often spoke highly of you. Said you'd do anything for him."
I glanced at my watch.
Xavier narrowed his gaze. "With your column, you have a direct line to the most awful people on the Internet. More than any other columnist, you attract the worst that humanity has to offer."
It was true. You could catch a disease loitering in the comments section of some of my articles.
"We want you to start turning the tide. Use your column to spread good through the world. Teach your readers important things, like when to not yell at bus drivers, and how to order a sandwich without offending four different cultures."
I frowned. "But by doing that, won't I change the future? Won't you cease to exist? And if you cease to exist, how will we have had this conversation? Will I then go back to writing William H. Macy snuff-fic? And otherwise keep making the world worse with everything I do?"
Xavier shrugged. "Honestly? I don't think it matters. Do you really expect people to read your stupid time travel column that closely?"
I nodded. Xavier's lack of respect for the audience impressed me. He really was a natural Cracked editor. "Deal." I spit into my palm and extended it to him. He looked back and forth between me and it with disgust etched into his face.
___
So, after visiting the archive of horse race results which Cracked has always kept on hand for visiting time travelers, I returned to my phone booth and *FLUP*ed my way back to the somewhat-earlier 21st century. And now that I'm back readers, please, heed my words!
Be good to each other! People who disagree with you are not necessarily fags. And if they are, that's actually not that remarkable. Using racial slurs to describe people you dislike is incredibly ignorant and hateful. It makes you a measurably worse person, and you will eventually cross someone who will stab you in the throat for it. Most people should never and could never suck a thousand burning dicks. It's dangerous and basically unfeasible. Almost everyone's mom is an OK lady, and even if they're not, you should get to know her first before making any bold claims about her. You can make a difference, so long as you never try to get a small nuclear reactor drunk.
___
I have an old Cracked magazine
ReplyThen you, sir, are a greater man than I.
I go into these Xbox Live lobbies on games all the time, and encounter the most ignorant, racist back-woods people who should have been aborted immediately BEFORE their birth, and the one way to really get at them, is to laugh at everything they say. They hate this, and will soon enough insult you one last time, with their screeching voice blaring in the microphone, before leaving and talking to their like-minded friends about the "Douche in that lobby that was laughing like a retard, Haxorz." Some may make vague threats about 'hacking' your account, but few have the ability, and even fewer have the strength or attention span to move their fingers, or bodies from that spot. The more you feed the trolls, the cooler they will feel, and the more justified they will seem in spreading this hate-storm of pseudo-English insults around the web while blaring in "Leet-Speek" at you for being a "NooB". Don't spread the hate, spread the laughter.
ReplyI always found that the best way to deal with them was to either compose even crappier insults than they can (gay n****r ass s**t f**k was always one of my most successful taunts, if it can still qualify as a taunt) or if in a group, discuss various things in the least opinionated way you can and when the allegations of what they did to your mother in order to create you despite the one year age gap that almost always exists between you and your aggressor(s) making most of these half assed burns biologically impossible, simply agree and continue your discussion. Both of these tactics rely on you out-mentally incompetenting your foe which can be difficult when dealing with 13 year old boys, but when you succeed you get a warm, tingly feeling inside, much like a self induced orgasm except more pathetic (when you feel it, you'll know. Then you'll fall into a pit of self loathing for a good hour or so after) but once the main pleasure comes from knowing that somewhere in the world, a kid that has just started high school is crying or throwing a tantrum because he had to stop playing call of duty earlier than usual because his mother or older sibling overheard him swearing at a complete idiot, who's secretly intelligent and probably suave and devilishly handsome, over the Internet.
'had sex with a nuclear reactor'.
Reply...Yeah, that's probably not too far-fetched.
For DOB? Not even slightly.
This is actually very true. My boyfriend is your stero-typical gamer who gets very loud and hurls insults as soon as a team-mate doesn't do exactly what he's thinking they need to be doing. He usually doesn't get to graphic by bringing moms and implications about penises into it, but he still calls people things like f*g and retarded. I didn't realize the extent that this had been effecting me till I was on WoW yesterday and actually had to consciencley refrain from cursing someone out in chat. While typing I realized it might have been a 13 year old kid who might never have tanked a heoric before, and cursing them out would only make them feel terrible and make me look like an ass.
ReplyYou need to ditch the boyfriend and get you a man.
let's not forget the nerds who will run into the streets shouting Leeeroy Jenkiins
ReplyI did that with some friends on a bikes a few days ago, we were crossing a really busy intersection in downtown Toronto
Anyone else skip the last part?
ReplyIt was hilarious.
Also, nice job with the 1984 reference. I only mention it to feel like a smart person.
@TitzMkgee you mean the image?
Why is jew an insult? I'd be much more offended if someone called me a christian
Reply Hide All See All 6 RepliesI'd be much more offended if someone called you a person.
Flawless victory.
Just as planned.
I'd me much more offended if someone called me either. Religion is stupid.
there is a troll in our midst they can only see movement so keep very still and he will go away
They mean Jew as in you. It's super hacker leet speak and you wouldn't understand.(i sure as hell don't and i was around during the irc days)
How exactly is "f*g" a racial slur?
Replybecause it is, you f*g darky jew.
I thought they were two different points.
wow i can? sweet
Replyyou know what I'm gonna do to your mom? I'M GONNA TAKE HER TO DINNER IF YOU DON'T STOP JEWING THE GAME UP!!!!
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesDude your doing it wrong.
:D
Your mom is a respectable member of society who contributes a lot!
Your mother is a classy lady!
The sun will be blotted out with COD noobs screaming profanities and "COMMANDO PRO!"
ReplyKeeping the streek alive!!
Reply"It was true. You could catch a disease loitering in the comments section of some of my articles."
ReplyWow, so just be leaving a comment here my rating as human plummets. My humanity karma score drops with every word I type, keep this up and I'll soon be at the same level as pond sc*m!
n****r JEW COMMUNIST f*g f**kERS f**kWIT f*g
ReplyXbox live zombies walking the streets... hide the fan fiction books now before its too late. My last visit lasted five minutes and I don't wanna vacation there again, least of all let those blue tanned wet halfcyber sociopaths out of mom's parlour. Because lets be honest if we are talking about the fall of societies businesses and banking, then maybe we are on the smart road to the future. Just maybe. Its only an idea, let it go. But the xbox halfcyber borgs and their earpieces *keeping it real*? I shudder to think. Feitzer (makers of prozac) would be a stock worth investing in at this stage. Because when they realise that halo hasn't happened and they only have sticks to beat each other with whilst screaming "your father obviously didn't realise he'd walked into a straight bar when he got you, f*g", there mommy's are gonna need something to keep calm on. I should maybe also take out some shares in Ritalin and all anti psychotics now just in case.
Reply*it's
*let's
*society's
*It's
*Pfizer
*their
*mommies
Disco would come back. Think about it.
Reply Hide All See All 4 RepliesAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Is the long AAAH! an expression of terror or the intro to a disco track? I'll assume terror, for humanity's sake.
Get down, get down .. get down, get down. Jungle boogie. Jungle boogie.
THAT'S a fine example of the disease you could get here. Just reading that caused my damage braining :(
"It was true. You could catch a disease loitering in the comments section of some of my articles."
ReplyFor real?? Well, s**t. I am feeling a bit headachy....
i'm personally going to set joe lieberman on fire, and later piss on his corpse to put it out if this bill passes.
ReplyRemember, you're not supposed to put out the fire with your piss until after he has died.
Is it just me, or does it seem like hitting a switch that permanently turns off the internet would be the best thing that anyone could do for society? And yes, I understand the inherent hypocrisy of writing that in the comments section of an internet article.
Reply Hide All See All 12 RepliesNo. It'd be like shutting off electricity. Millions would have absolutely no idea what to do. Businesses wouldn't be able to function. Basically everyone in the computer industry would be out of a job. Want to write a research paper? Have fun spending days and weeks at a library and failing all your assignments while teachers adjust to the fact that students no longer have a plentiful supply of I formation. Banking and stocks will be thrown into turmoil. We'll deliver everything by snail mail again. A whole slew of other stuff.
No, shutting off the Internet would not be the best thing to do.
I disagree w/ Kaori242. Last time I checked, the food in the fridge would not go stale and hospitals and cities would still be functioning and we wouldn't all be in the f**king dark after sundown if the internet went out. If it did, a lot of web businesses, advertisors, and stockbrokers would flip their s**t, but life would quickly adjust. Hell, most of us were alive fifteen years ago when this whole internet thing really took off. We'd go back to hard copies and typing on paper. Stockbrokers would actually have to go back to personally trading over phones and down in the pen; being personally accountable for their actions instead of relying on computer programs to trade 70-80% of stocks as they do now. Hell, we might all become a little more personally responsible if we had to compose a letter that would take a week to get where it was going, rather than just posting any random thought that comes to mind instantly. We might learn a little more or at least retain it longer if we had to "go back" to libraries where there are books in which authors spent years compiling sources and first-hand information on a subject before it could even have the right to be published, instead of the product of someone online where there are virtually no guidelines or restrictions to posting and whose research in many cases is a simple as cutting and pasting. Hell, every professor I ever had BEMOANED THE FACT THAT STUDENTS SUBSTITUTED BOOKS FOR GOOGLING. Things would slow down, but realize 80-90% of the internet now is comprised of b.s. (and pornography), and only facilitates the spread of bad information to a larger number of people than ever before in the past. I'm not in favor of shutting it down per se, but it IS a double-edged sword. And the situation would definitely not be as bad as Kaori242 makes it sound, either.
...also, without the internet, entertainment as a whole would probably vastly improve. We live in an age of complete style over substance because style is just a click away and actually creating populist art requires money, time, and talent. That's why music sucks because so many people download it, making the album format a joke and making it revert to a singles market like the '50s again, and hawking albums by TV show winners (Idol, and Disney) with all this tween and twee s**t that thirteen year old girls with little to no experience downloading will see in the mall and beg their parents to buy for them in CD form. Goddamn Bieber, Miley, and the Jonas bros, and lady Gaga for stealing equally from glam rock, plastic accessories, and eurotrash. As for movies; same story, different context, where the only hip stars really are holdovers from the 90s, and all this Twilight nonsense just filled a void from the nascent Harry Potter fantasy/mystical series which was doing so well. Our music and films are becoming s**ttier as a direct result of lost profits due, in large part, to such practices as file-sharing. Nip the net, and you might see a gradual upswing in quality. With the advent of youtube, why buy or rent an old movie or show when you can just rip a copy for nothing, or watch it during a break? Yes, society probably WOULD be better without internet, I'm afraid.
Here is, point by point, why stormyguero is wrong and off his ass. The food in the fridge wouldn't go bad, but once its out, good luck going to the grocery store and getting more. The network that handles stocking the shelves of grocery stores by shipping from producers is handled by the internet. If you go to the hospital, all of your medical information is stored online, the hard copies are scattered across every doctor you've ever been examined by, so I hope you remember your own medical history. Electrical grids use the internet to communicate with each other, if the internet shut down they would all stop communicating and in major cities engineers would have to be dispatched to reboot any parts of the grid that malfunction, but how would they know which ones to go to? Call them? Most phone lines use the same channels the internet now uses. The majourity of the economy relies on communicating via the internet, not just for stock trading, but for logistics and distribution purposes as well. Also, you speak of going back to libraries as some exodus from the shackles of the internet, despite the fact that the internet has given access to communities that don't have access to the information of a large library. I work in a library, and the internet has made it so people come in and reference material without checking it out, which means less books being pilfered because college students forget about s**t. Also your 80-90% statistic is just ignonarnt, that's a good argument, make up a statistic to make your ill-informed opinion seem legitamite. Saying things would 'slow down' is an understatement. Just because you only use the internet to read comedy articles and then use falacious logic to make yourself seem intelligent doesn't mean the majourity of the rest of the world doesn't use it for its intended puprose, as a communication medium. Your second comment is DRENCHED in bulls**t. To declare money as one of the key aspects of populist art is beyond ridiculous. How the f**k does the internet have anything to do woth American Idol or Justin Bieber? Musical acts like that existed in this 15 year ago golden age where everyone apparentlly danced in fields of rye and sang songs about Atlantis. Contrary to your ass backward opinion, the internet has made it so all you need is a computer and an internet connection to get your art out to the world. The underground music scene of almost evry genre has exploded with fresh material since music you may enjoy is just a click away, and this means that bands can generate followings without requiring corporate intervention. Case in point, your opinion is less than an opinion, it is an anti-fact, as it pulls from a series of baseless claims that if you didn't just generate them from your own crazed mind you probably researched them...on the internet.
Insain wall of text factor...... but I completely agree with Kaori. Peiople wount know what to do and, a lot of businesses will go down. then we might have to go back to using archaic things such as billboards to advertise. UGH!
Are you retarded? Hospitals and cities would absolutely NOT be functioning if we turned off the internet. Hospital records, patient history, requests for medication are all stored online, among many other things hospitals need to function. Also, traffic light systems are online, city records are online, business practices are online (and if no one could work, it'd be a little hard for a city to function as no one would have disposable cash), again among other things online that a city needs to function.
also, you say the food would not go stale in our fridge etc. do you even understand the role the internet plays in getting that food from production to your door, ordering machine parts for the harvesters, organising orders for supermarkets, managing employee pay records, your credit cards, not he food wouldnt go stale in your cupboards, it wouldnt get there in the first place, hospitals rely on the internet entirely for stuff like data transfer, symptom analysis and equipment orders, stuff like art would suffer because getting recognition would once again be limited to who you know, rather than being able to post up for anyone to see, our society would fall to pieces without the internet, years ago people functioned without cars and electricity, that doesnt mean society can still do that now, you're an idiot
The internet can be used for more than just entertainment purposes. I'm too lazy to get into it, but no it's not a good idea. Plus, how would everyone play World of Warcraft?
Most of the world's population would have a sad if the Internet were gone.
Also, if the Internet went down, how would I masturbate?! Playboy magazines?! Don't even f**king joke about that...
f**k walls of text...
The internet, while it fuels just some of the -worst- behaviours in people. also connects people. If it were to abruptly be taken away, A LOT of people would suffer. Businesses, government, private users...Sure, they'd adjust -eventually-, but the sudden loss of the thing that had arguably the most dramatic technological impact on society would send people into chaos.
Wow. A year later, I had no idea how much of a conversation my comment would spark. You all make good points, but I think we can all agree that there are a lot of great things and a lot of terrible things about the internet. I still stand by what I said to a point, but maybe not just a switch that turns it off immediately. If we as a society made a year or maybe a five-year plan to shut it off, so we could prepare, I think there would be a lot of positives. While we all enjoy the convenience, I definitely think there is such a thing as too much convenience. And the effect on art and entertainment, as some of you mentioned, I definitely think was detrimental. It's great that anyone can produce art and have it seen by the world, but there has inarguably been a glut of low quality stuff since the advent of the internet. From a personal standpoint, there's something to be said for the experience of searching through record store bins for a rare album or a rare movie. Thanks for the good discussion, everybody.
To everyone making jokes around the whole "don't troll" part of Bucholz's article by pretending to troll... That's something nine-year-olds do...and while I realize that (as countless Cracked columnists have told me) the average mental complexity of most Cracked readers is about par to that of a nine-year-old, the joke is getting kind of lame. People were making that joke FIVE FREAKING MONTHS AGO.
Reply Hide All See All 3 Repliesyet you still trolled...I thought nine-year-olds were better now, what with their NERF Guns and Barbie dolls.
So how do you feel about questioning the relative 'freshness' of a joke that doesn't even really matter? How hip art thou? The comments are as relevant as whenever someone read the article, whether that's when it was originally posted or months or years from now. Take a Zoloft, and stop flaming people just like you.
you're comment lost all creditability when you used the phrase "how hip art thou"