Before we destroy mankind’s greatest, vastest machine, let’s get something polite out of the way: don’t. Destroying the Internet’s core infrastructure would constitute the greatest act of global terrorism in history and/or a declaration of war against every sovereign nation in existence—to say nothing of the danger it would put both you and others in. This is a thought exercise.
As I’m writing this, I’m struck by how much of da Interwebs we take for granted…and how little the vast majority of us know about what makes it tick. F’rinstance, did you know that the Internet is largely composed of hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber optic cable…and more metal and plastic than mere human intellect could possibly imagine? The Internet is in many ways a real, tangible thing…and yet most of us take it for granted in the same way we do air, water, and Glee.
It turns out that destroying the Internet (PLEASE don’t) isn’t the mystical, digital process you might have thought. In fact, bringing down da Interwebs would likely have to involve a fair amount of good, old fashioned brute force.
Like any man-made object, the Internet is vulnerable and breakable. This shouldn’t be taken as an invitation to go out and destroy it, of course (where else would you get your porn?). It turns out that the entity we largely take for granted as some sort of transparent, ever-present, indestructible source of all wisdom and knowledge is none of those things.
Hmm…it seems that the late Sen. Ted Stevens may have been right after all. The Internet really IS a collection of (something closely resembling) tubes. Go figure….
