When the Internet Shuts Down, We Will Definitely All Die

Recent study suggests if you don’t know what Kylie Jenner has had for breakfast there’s a 99.9% chance you will forget how to breathe.

Your phones, your tablets, your iPads, your mp3 players, your smart watches, your fancy fridges from John Lewis: they all are united by one holy binding force, they all have Wi-Fi.  A spiritual messenger that guides you with heavenly power through every half second of the day.  Her knowledge is as infinite and as boundless as the universe. Don’t know whether goldfish can survive in milk or not? Is Africa a country? Need to urgently know whether your Aunt Meredith who you haven’t seen for 7 years got a refund on her hairdryer she got from amazon last week?  The internet has you covered.

As our solar system orbits around the sun, we orbit around our love of telling the interwoven virtual sphere about  the precise length of toilet paper we prefer to use down to the nearest millimetre  and if we scrunch that said toilet paper or fold it, or whether we think Boris Johnson is just a stupid bloke with stupider hair. The internet is a realm of omnipresent light and wonder: within in it is the endless turbulent ocean of Brexit tweets, the bright sky of Instagram illuminated with the cotton clouds of self-indulgent, nauseating, duck faced selfies captioned with the feeble deterrent from blatant vanity “mains chose”, the arid deserts of Facebook which has been grasped by the talons of your middle aged relatives, plagued with humourless memes uncovered from the depths of 2012, and the deep forests of Snapchat riddled with entanglements of your acquaintances filming the entirety of their life and exhibiting their woeful emotional state with the words “you broke my heart *crying emoji* nr” against a picture of their thumb pressed up against their camera.

Without Wi-Fi are you going to survive in the real world? The answer is no and if you said yes you are an actual idiot. How do you think how you can get to Sainsbury’s when you can’t call an uber? How are you going to speak to anyone when you can’t iMessage them? Walk? Formulate sounds from your mouth into words? Are you out of your mind?

Face it. Without the internet you’re nothing, a fleck of dirt, a microscopic molecule, a single celled organism but with the internet? You’ve got a G-Wagon, a teeth whitening sponsorship and your own gluten free cookbook.

If it all breaks down I simply shudder at the horrendous toll it will take on our present world. The streets will lay barren and everything will erupt in complete anarchy. Dominos will become obsolete with no internet to order pizza and in result we will starve to death if our insanity doesn’t kill us first. We will all become reclusive worms covered in moist, dense layers of filth and grime, never getting out of bed because our phone alarms haven’t woken us yet, incessantly mumbling to ourselves as there’s no status update to tell everyone about the type of moisturiser you use and not being able to fend for yourself as there is nowhere to google “how to cook an egg.” All we will be reduced to is squirming under the covers drenched in sweat and stench, constantly thinking about how much you yearn to just catch a thirty second glimpse of that “Top 10 Rare Two-Headed Animals” video. It’s a horrific thing to imagine. A life without internet. It’s hard to even begin to comprehend the world before then. Henry the Eighth had no way of updating his relationship status and its highly likely that the death of three of his six wives is directly correlated to the absence of Facebook.

Bradley, 36 from Sheffield, is a brave survivor of what is known in the medical world as “not knowing the Wi-Fi password.” Upon my interview with him he revealed the shocking implications of this harrowing disease. He comments: “It all started when I was at Starbucks, it’s hard to go back to that moment, I actually had to make eye contact with the barista and…. ask him” These are the only words he was able to articulate before he broke down, sobbing. Bradley’s mother, who lets him live in her attic, says that every week his sheets must be washed fortnightly when he wets the bed after having frequent nightmares about the ordeal.

So now you have been warned. Thinking about that “internet detox?” Just don’t do it. Ever.