The Big Red Button

Everyone knows the internet belongs to the United States. It just does. So it tracks, in a bleak sort of way, that America floated the idea of an internet kill switch—emergency legislation that would give the president power to shut the whole thing down in a national crisis. One bad afternoon in Washington and the lights go out globally. Thanks for holding that for us, guys.

Picture it in practice: you’re mid-session on something important—homework, an eBay bid, swapping questionable photos with a relative—and somewhere in DC someone’s fuse blows, and it’s just gone. No Twitter. No 4chan. No World of Warcraft. Just you and the walls and the creeping realization that you don’t actually know anyone’s phone number.

You’d dust off the Super Nintendo, obviously. There’d be a grim satisfaction in it for about forty minutes, then boredom, then the old photo albums. Letters, maybe. It sounds almost pastoral until you remember that pastoral is another word for boring and slightly miserable. The internet is annoying and surveilled and full of garbage, but the alternative is what—the Taliban win on a technicality and we all learn to macramé? Thank you, Obama. I’ll be fine. I’ll just be absolutely furious about it.