No Internet

I remember watching this South Park episode where the internet just vanishes one morning. Everyone in town immediately comes unglued—panic, withdrawal, chaos. It’s the kind of premise that should feel like old satire, except it doesn’t anymore.

The thing is, the episode wasn’t wrong about what we’d actually be like. Watch someone go a day without their phone and you see it happen in real time—that specific anxiety, the reaching, the phantom notifications. We’re not exaggerating when we say we can’t function. We genuinely can’t, most of us.

What made the episode stick with me wasn’t the gag. It was how quickly it stopped being funny. By the end it’s just people breaking down, unable to cope with basic existence without their connection. It’s supposed to be absurd but it’s barely hyperbole anymore.

I think about that sometimes when I’m offline for a few hours and I feel that first flicker of panic, that pull toward checking something that isn’t there. How weird it is that a basic infrastructure—something that didn’t exist twenty years ago—is now so woven into everything that its absence feels like a catastrophe instead of just an inconvenience.

The episode nailed something true. We’re all just waiting for the day the internet actually breaks and we get to find out what happens.