I don’t know what time it is, or even what day it is for that matter. I instinctively check my phone but there’s still nothing but darkness, like everywhere else. I don’t know how long it’s been since the internet went down but already it feels like an eternity.

I want to let my friends know I’m okay, I want to find out if they are too, but there’s no Facebook status to update or to check. So I wander outside to find a large brick wall still standing and

I write on it ‘I am Alive #survival’

and then I scrawl the small symbol of a thumbs up beneath it, encouraging people to ‘like’ my status.

I amble around aimlessly, without any kind of GPS or mapping software I have no idea where I’m going or even where I am. I remember reading something online about how to navigate by the stars, or something about how moss only grows on the north or south side of trees, but I can’t look it up to check and really I don’t remember.

You wouldn’t believe what I would give for a random Wikipedia article right now.

I used to be worth something, some amount of money that meant that I could have things. It turns out that was all just numbers on a screen. Numbers that, without the internet, are completely worthless. There’s no credit anymore, no debt. Things are not traded or swapped, like on gumtree.com or Craig’s List.

Banking is not the only thing that has disappeared. Without the internet to co-ordinate them complete global systems have collapsed; electrical networks, communications empires, whole governments destroyed. So I suppose there’s no way left to fight wars anymore, or at least there’s no news feed to constantly update me about those wars.

Markings made by other foragers carved into the trunks of nearby trees identify areas where good food can be found, a rudimentary version of UrbanSpoon I suppose. I gather together some berries and before eating them I take a moment to appreciate how they look, wishing to myself I could share them on Instagram. This is the world without the internet.

This might all seem ridiculous, and to an extent, it is, but what would you do in a world without the internet? It’s a common enough conversation these days, ‘How did people find each other before mobile phones?’, ‘How did people communicate without facebook or e-mail?’ ‘What did people do before the internet?’ It’s something about the nature of human progress that as soon as something is accomplished one can hardly conceptualise a world without it. One imagines a couple of cavemen sitting around the fire asking ‘What did people do before fire?’ Or some Renaissance men querying how people survived before the printing press?

The externalisation of knowledge, as in the move towards recording information in devices other than the human brain, has been the key driving force in human development for our entire history as a species. Each new development in recording and distributing information has led to far reaching changes in the structure of society, so much so that it makes the world that existed previously inconceivable.

Yet the more we become reliant on this externalised knowledge the less we seem to know ourselves. Debates about complicated concepts are resolved expediently with the practice of simply ‘googling it.’ With first results favoured and discussions on the topic limited to a simple question and answer exercise, ideas that would otherwise be further extrapolated upon are now reduced to whatever the most popular result claims it is.

An episode of South Park looks at the idea of the internet going down. In the episode America reverts to a depression era, dustbowl version of itself, with families moving West seeking the last remaining vestiges of the internet in the promised land of California. The drama Revolution also explores this concept in a less satirical but equally far-fetched fashion with the world reverting to a survivalist dystopia.

Would we end up foraging for foodstuffs in abandoned shopping centres? Planting bean stalks on skyscraper roofs and sending smoke signals in lieu of e-mails? Would we spend our days dreaming of messages of hope tweeted out in one hundred and forty characters or less? Would the world as we know it cease to function? Probably not.

Despite the warnings of survivalists and luddites the world over such a scenario is fairly unlikely. Not only is the idea of the internet ‘going down’ unlikely but the vast data storage units not reliant on the internet would mean that most information would remain accessible in some way or another. More importantly perhaps those who argue that society would crumble vastly underestimate humanity’s abilities to thrive and survive. It is not our reliance on one source of information or another that has allowed us to survive it is in our ability to adapt.

A world without the internet would be much like the world before the internet, you could still ‘Google’ things, this used to just be called ‘looking something up’ and was usually accomplished by reading through several books. You could still send e-mails, there’s a word for this I think it’s just mail without the ‘e’ crazy as that might sound. Above all you could still interact with people and function in society without snapchat.

So why is it that a world like this seems so inconceivable now, a world that not that long ago was the world we all lived in. Maybe it’s because the world we live in seems to have come so far, because it seems like we have so much that sometimes it’s so hard to accept the world we live in and that then becomes impossible to conceive of the world being any other way.