How to Survive an Internet Apocalypse : The New Yorker

Final paragraph from a timely reality check

"The big lesson of the simulation was that building a post-apocalyptic network is hard. This wasn’t particularly surprising, but it was still alarming. Judging by the documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor, the “Internet apocalypse” might not arrive with a bang but through the slower and more subtle means of corporate centralization, censorship, and surveillance. The Internet is, by definition, a “network of networks,” one that grew over time from an American military grid to an all-encompassing infrastructure that guides our social, political, and economic activity. As we rely on the Internet to facilitate a growing list of ever more mundane activities, connecting everything from our phones to our refrigerators, we are frighteningly ill-prepared to create parallel networks of our own—the ones we may need the most."

How to Survive an Internet Apocalypse : The New Yorker