Originally published by Mark E. Jeftovic @jeftovic on X.
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· 2026-02-16T17:08:02.000Z
Last night I was up until 1:30am trying to fix a home networking issue that rendered my laptop completely unable to get on the internet. The entire ordeal reminded me that without net access, it may as well have been bricked. At least it felt that way.
(The problem turned out to be that the new Netgear switch I bought a couple weeks ago was scrambling the MAC address table, even after repeated reboots. Total PoS)
But as I’m flailing away, trying to do what I can with my mobile device over LTE data to look at things (ok, by “look at things” I mean “asking chatGPT what to do” and yes, even WiFi was borked), I was realizing just how fucked I would be, personally, without the ability to connect to the net – and I say this as a guy who avoids “cloud” as a matter of principle.
At the $dayjob (@easydns) we avoid centralized cloud providers where we can, which means
- Mattermost, not Slack.
- Jitsi, not Zoom, and
- Passbolt, not LastPass
Everything we can self-host inside our own DMZ, we do, so if things go very terribly wrong, at least it’s on us and not because some upstream cloud provider set their password to “Password123” (after which an intern their git pushed it into a public repository).
But even then, events like last night showed me my dependance on connectivity if not some manner of “cloud” computing.
All kinds of little things were malfunctioning or offline: from our camera monitors to the Christmas lights on the tree out front. I had promised a pair of hockey tickets to my nextdoor neighbour and I couldn’t even e-transfer them without access to to our internal LAN, because my Ticketmaster login was in our internal vault.
It reminded me of a movie I saw over a decade ago: Ghosts With Shit Jobs which posited a near-future America after an economic crash that brought about the next Great Depression, and it followed the lives of a few different gringos as they scrounged through a post-collapse economy that eerily resembles the “gig economy” or “side hustle” landscape many are mired in today…
One line in that movie really struck me at the time, I found myself remembering it this morning: it was when one of the “radioactive cobweb harvester” brothers, Anton and Toph explained how their parents lost everything: which is why they had been reduced to a life of extremely harrowing and dangerous work, for which they were paid, in water.
“Our whole family got screwed over when the cloud was repossessed. I mean, all of our data was there, you know, all of it… Network, legal, authenticators… Parents had to start from scratch.”
What strikes me about that message today is realizing that there wasn’t even any mention of money, or assets being lost: the family was ruined through losing access to their ability to manage any wealth or property they may have had (Bitcoiners have a phrase for this: Not your keys, not your coins).
Internet connectivity is already ubiquitous and something we take for granted, fifty years or so ago, the same happened with electricity.
We don’t even think about these things or notice them anymore, unless they stop working (we’ve actually being saying exactly this about DNS from the very beginning).
You know what the next indispensable thing is that layers on top of electricity, and internet?
I probably don’t even have to say it.
@grok what is the OP suggesting will be the next indispensable layer of technology atop the Internet?
(some wiseass, no doubt).
Without AI I’d probably still be working on the issue (although, in the end I was the one who tried taking the switch out of the loop entirely. But I still needed chatGPT to help me unscramble my laptop’s network cache).
It probably took a good few decades to become utterly reliant on the physical layers of modern infrastructure: electrical grid, water, etc)
The Internet started gathering momentum in the 90’s but if some kind of Carrington Event vapourized the entire thing while it was still in the early innings, maybe as late as the early 00’s, we’d probably still have muddled through.
Today it would be a civilization ender.
How long will it take AI embedded into everything to become ubiquitous and indispensable?
We’re practically there now. Another year, is my guess.
