The internet is nothing more than a worldwide web of interconnected computer networks. So essentially, what you’re asking is either:
- ”what if we never invented computers,” or
- “what if we invented computers, but never connected them.”
In scenario one, we bounce back about a century in evolution. Without computers, we never refine data enough to slow down climate change, create better working conditions, etc.
Automation never occurs, and humans are still stuck doing extremely dangerous jobs. Although at least the danger was more exciting than the alternative. Most people’s jobs in any industry boil down to being buried in nonstop paperwork.
Have you ever been to a county court? They still do so much paperwork with so many copies. Your life would quickly lose meaning among the mountain of paperwork. Your hands dry up and you have paper cuts everywhere that burn like the fires of hell.
We would all have to take advanced calculus without a graphing calculator. A few dozen televisions stations and a newspaper somewhere in the vicinity of your front doorstep would be the only ways you could stay up on what’s happening in the world.
We are all sick and injured more often, and we die earlier. There’s no way of knowing exactly why without digging into a whole other mountain of paperwork.
Also, we never made it to space, and there are no satellites. Flat earthers have more power than you are comfortable in this scenario. But you’re just waiting for sweet, sweet death to end your miserable, papercut-filled life.
In scenario 2, the world is a little less bleak. We invented the ability to talk to each other on the telephone and broadcast radio and television signals without the need for computers. So in this case, we’ve somehow not yet figured out that computers can also communicate using these lines. I’m not sure how we missed it, since all the ingredients are there.
In this scenario, we still have Microsoft and Apple dominating the world, and nobody ever heard of Google, Facebook, nor Amazon. As the sole gatekeepers of usable computer operating systems, Gates and Jobs maintain a complete duopoly over tech for half a century.
Thankfully, there’s less paperwork, although you still have to buy everything on a physical media. You can only drive to the store and buy the released version of the software. There are no updates, so if something is broken, you are out of luck.
We don’t have two-day shipping, and it takes a long time to get anything. Stores never had to compete with Amazon, so Kmart, Sears, Toys R Us, Woolworth, and all sorts of other stores are still around.
Of course, everybody is struggling, because the pandemic hit businesses much harder. There’s no online ordering, and services like DoorDash never came to be.
Drone warfare isn’t possible, and with no social media to spawn influencers, a lot of younger people are joining the global war. Because there’s no internet to fact check, we have fewer sources, and it’s a lot harder to know what’s real anymore.
Without Facebook, you actually have to go to your friend’s house to watch a long, boring slideshow of their vacation photos. If you’re rich, you have a Blu-Ray-based navigation system in the back of your car with maps of the whole country preloaded. Hopefully, there hasn’t been any changes to the roadways in the last 3 years since you bought it.
The rest of us poors are buying paper maps at every gas station we stop at along the road to regain our bearings. You pay in cash, because it takes too long for the station to run your card manually, send the receipts to the bank, and have them clear the transaction. Financial fraud in this laborious world runs rampant.
But suddenly one woman figures it out. She notices that we built computers with the same ones and zeroes as the radio and TV used to broadcast. We’ve been recording things like audio and video on drives and disks this entire time. All data is the same, and there’s no reason we can’t build a web platform that can be used by anybody.
We cheer and quickly give credit to her husband as it occurs to us how obvious this was the entire time. We quickly fill it with pictures of kittens and videos of us having sex with each other. It gains popularity, and everybody connects to start bragging and yelling at each other.
Five years from now, the iPhone gets invented, but half the population prefers their Windows Zune phone.