That lady who snapped at the camera—“I would ban all those internets”— became quite a meme, an icon even. An icon of what, exactly? For those who remember their history, it brought to mind the silk-weavers’ riots in Lyon (1831), also tied to smashing the machines that were supposedly stealing people’s work and wages. She didn’t smash anything, but the displeasure radiating off her was real.

Let’s try, just for a moment, to imagine a world without those internets. I won’t push it all the way back to horse-drawn carts. It’s enough to picture a bunch of lonely computers with no email. How would they talk to each other—carrier pigeons, telegrams, fax, or perhaps the post (envelope, address, stick on a stamp, and into the box)? And how would you kids run your midnight game sessions with opponents on the other side of the world?

These days even a telescope (say, the JWST) doesn’t look at the stars without an online link to other telescopes around the globe. Look—there’s a shooting star. Make a wish.

An even more dystopian picture is trying to manage (for instance, warehouse stock) without online data. My friend Martin (yes, we know his full name; available from the editorial desk on request) sits in a café and says, “hang on a second, I need to check that order,” and he looks into his phone, onto those internets, where it tells him exactly how his order stands. How do “they” know?

My dad is fun to be around. Not long ago he asked, guileless and a bit rhetorically, how the Romans managed the biggest empire of their day without mobile phones and the internet! Just imagine the building permits, the rubber stamps. Funnier still is the image of Cyrus the Great, King of Kings, sending a messenger to the edge of the empire to find out what’s going on there. The messenger rides day and night for a month, reaches the frontier, takes a look, turns his horse around, and rides a month back to report the “current” situation—after first prostrating himself before the King of Kings.

It remains a mystery what that lady had in mind when she wanted to ban the internets. Maybe she hadn’t thought it through. Maybe it irks her that anyone can write and draw whatever they please there—which is a bit of a problem, because when more people say big stupid things, those stupid things start to look more like the truth. Or maybe someone wrote her a personal insult and she wants to solve it with a ban. Could be.
Life without those internets would be hard and complicated for us. But maybe she’ll think it over and say that’s not how she meant it.

* Jiří Wolker (1900–1924): Host do domu (1922)
The Mailbox
A mailbox on the corner of the street is no ordinary thing.
It blooms in blue; people hold it in high regard, entrust themselves to it completely.
They toss little letters into it from both sides—sad ones from one, happy ones from the other.