It’s interesting you bring up the effects of the post-apocalypse on the internet. I think more than anything, I find fascinating the idea of communication using the internet. I know that the internet is in many ways like the hydra, in that it doesn’t have one centralized source which, if destroyed, would end the internet. It’s more like an intricate web of sources, or pillars, which hold the entire infrastructure up. Having said that, it would definitely keep running for at least a little bit after humanity would lose control over its technological infrastructure.
What I find interesting to think about is what exactly we would use it for? In my personal opinion, it’d be useless to try and preserve the data and information that exists online, in an effort to retain all the human knowledge we have garnered so far. Which is pretty huge, in that we kind of depend on the ability to store knowledge and information, and we stopped doing it in books as much as we used to, so most of our knowledge is digital in nature.
I think the focus would fall on the communicative abilities of the internet. Being able to reach people and extend current information would seem to me to be the most important aspect of whether the internet existed or not, in a post-human world. However, it would still be only a matter of time where every aspect of the internet is lost. So I wonder then, of all technological blows we could suffer, would this one be the greatest? Technologies develop and evolve and come and go, the internet is much more fluid but also much more influential. Of all technologies, it seems we’ve become dependent on the internet most rapidly, letting it in our lives in a matter of two decades, as if it always belonged there. Which is interesting to think about, the development of the internet and its rapid growth seems almost like it was naturally meant to be.