This scenario is based from our monthly scenario club at the Urgent Optimists.
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Scenario: The Day the Internet Disappeared (from the Urgent Optimists)
A Friday morning, ten years from now
Your phone buzzes twice, and then it makes a strange noise.
You check the screen and realize it’s an emergency alert notification.
This is a message from the Department of Homeland Security. The president has declared a national cyber-emergency.
At 12:00:00 PM today, the internet and all cellular service within our borders will be temporarily shut down due to an urgent security threat.
Service will be shut down for at least fourteen days. During this time, there will be no public internet access. Mobile phones will be unable to make calls or send and receive messages.
There is no immediate threat to the public. Further information will be provided as soon as it is available. Thank you for your cooperation.
You’ve never seen an alert like this before. Is it for real?
Your mind starts racing as you think about all the things you won’t be able to do without internet or cell phone service.
Then you check the time. It’s 11:50 a.m. Only ten minutes until the shutdown starts!
Waking up to this future ten years from now, I imagine myself at a nook in the house where I do remote work, doing data simulations in the computer lab while sitting at home drinking teh tarik. My husband is also in his workspace at home, doing his research while our sons Daniel and Luke are out for a church summer camp.
Since the Covid-19 ten years ago, it seemed that the laggards never returned to the traditional way of work. Together with the early adopters, we shifted towards hybrid work. Online collaboration is the custom, and most of the files we work on are backed up in the cloud. It’s so reliable for years that receiving the national cyber-emergency message makes me confused. Like what? I only have 10 minutes to realign my life and how I work?
Is this just an emergency we’ll get out of within the day?
I don’t know what to feel at the moment. I’m still in a state of confusion, trying to make sense of it.
Fourteen days without internet access.
My simulations would have been done today, after three days of run time. All those hours were wasted, and I wouldn’t be able to work on the results while the internet is down.
Will our cash on hand last us for two weeks? Do you know this unexplainable gut feeling nagging you to do something you find unimportant at the moment? Now I regret not withdrawing some money yesterday. I could have squeezed it into my schedule instead of telling myself I’d do it today. Unfortunately, we’re too far away from the nearest ATM. Who would imagine that you’d lose internet access for two weeks, right? Online transactions are seamless not until this very moment. I can imagine people who vowed on the convenience of digital money panicking at the news.
While the time is counting down to an internet blackout, I think about our families back in the Philippines. The last time we went back was ten months ago. Are we on international news now? How will we reach out to them when the internet shuts off?
I hear my husband phone-calling our children and giving instructions on how to reach us once the internet is finally shut down. On the other side of the house, I try to make myself coherent and send the same message to our families in the Philippines, telling them our situation and what to expect in the next fourteen days.
I couldn’t think beyond letting our immediate families know our situation. Not yet. Perhaps, I’ll be able to think clearly after the ten minutes countdown is over.
I’m unsure if I’d be ready for this future. But this scenario has opened my mind to its possibility and allowed me to imagine what my life would be like should it happen ten years from now.
Quoting from a fellow Urgent Optimist, it would be “…a catastrophe of inconvenience and lost productivity.”
It’s your turn to imagine the unimaginable.
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jessa 