Imagine waking up and it’s all gone. No Google. No Spotify. No Instagram, email, Slack, streaming, cloud — nothing.

Would you know your best friend’s phone number? Could you find your job? Could you even remember what day it is?

The internet doesn’t just augment our lives — it scaffolds our identities.
Our tastes, our routines, our memories are increasingly stored elsewhere. Online.

We don’t carry knowledge — we carry links.
We don’t write letters — we send disappearing messages.
We don’t print photos — we tag them in pixels and pray the backup works.

So if it all disappeared… what’s left?

The cloud is a comfort. It holds our photos, our playlists, our thoughts. But it also atrophies something: memory.

We rely on autofill to remember our address, calendars to remember birthdays, search histories to remember what we were just thinking.

When everything is stored for us, we forget how to hold things ourselves.

In a world without the internet, we’d have to rebuild our mental maps — of people, places, histories. And we might rediscover how much we’ve outsourced.

The bigger question isn’t logistical — it’s existential.
Who are we when we’re not being perceived?
When we’re not performatively productive?
When our every thought isn’t timestamped, validated, or commented on?

Offline, there’s no applause. No feedback loop. Just presence.

It’s both terrifying and freeing. Terrifying, because silence can feel like erasure. Freeing, because you can exist without curating it.

The internet gave us scale — but maybe it cost us depth.