What would happen if the internet crashed everywhere- completely died, and didn’t come back? Tim Maughan’s Infinite Detail is a dystopian sci fi novel that hits close to home.

The book alternates between Before and After chapters, slowly revealing details on the great crash that destroyed the global internet infrastructure. There is also an ongoing long distance love story interrupted by the great crash.

The Before chapters are a slightly more advanced version of our current reality. Everything is connected and everything is tracked. People accept lack of privacy in exchange for extreme convenience. Almost everyone uses “Spex” which are glasses that allow people to access information just by moving your eyes- a step more convenient than a smartphone . Cities are all “smart” with services such as trash collection automated.

The book explores how the underclass is impacted by smart cities. Relying on RFID tags for recycling means people who collect cans to survive(canners) are subject to problems caused by technology. The city is full of canners:

There’s hundreds of us. Thousands, maybe. City is full of ’em. Used to be a lot of people did it as a part-time thing, but more and more are going full-time, it seems. Especially since there’s no work for cabbies now, y’know? I used to know a lot of cabbies that would just do a little canning on the side when work was slow and all, but now they gotta go full-time, they says. Say nobody wants anyone to drive a cab anymore. I ain’t worried, though.

The attitude of one superstar canner is eerily reminiscent of people who fail to keep up with changes in the digital economy:

“Hell yeah! Canning is a growth industry. I been doing this fifteen years, and every year I seen more cans than before. There’s always going to be canning, as long as there’s people that want to drink. They’ll never stop that. Never take that away from me. They might not need cab drivers anymore, but they’ll always need canners.” He smiles, for the first time. Rush isn’t sure what to say to him. He sighs and looks at the cart, and the hundreds of floating tags reappear. His heart sinks.

A group of disillusioned techno optimists are they key characters in the Before scenes. Their views are basically a more extreme version of current critics driving the anti Silicon Valley backlash. Many of them started out as idealists who believed in the internet, but became cynical as corporations and governments started using it for control.

We used to think that we could own it, that we were fighting to build communities for ourselves. That it was ours for the taking. To stake a claim for a place we could control and belong, a fight to make “safe spaces” for ourselves.It was a noble thing to think, that we were fighting for our own spaces, but we were kidding ourselves. We never owned these spaces, we never could. They were never ours to own, never ours to control. Instead we watch our battles turn into spectator sports, our revolutions turn to infighting. We watched our new communities dissolve into civil wars. We watched our political activist and community leaders become celebrity brands, our tech-utopian visionaries bow to capital and shareholders

A group of them builds an experimental community completely cut off from global networks. A terrorist group combines hacking with real life terrorism. Their motto is “With zero bandwidth there is no calling for backup.”

Rumors spread that someone is developing a virus that can impact all internet connected devices. When its released, people experience:

a very real sense that something had ended, had gone, something huge and fundamental. The feeling that a structure — a way of life, something nobody could really imagine changing — had collapsed. The end of being watched. The end of being tracked. The end of being indentured to it all. The end of capital. The end of security. The end of knowing. The end of safety. The end of being reassured. The end of being connected. The end of friendships. It was all there, in that crowd, sprayed across faces that had been denied sleep and electricity and communication for days — the fear, the uncertainty, the excitement, the thrill. The relief.

The After chapters describe a post apocalyptic hellscape where people struggle for survival. Chaos breaks out across the world as every city simultaneously goes dark. The descriptions are fantastic

…video games industry conference in Los Angeles that had to be abandoned and had quickly dissolved into spoiled man-children rioting; an automated container terminal in Shanghai that shut itself down for nearly a week and caused the collapse of at least two shipping companies; and countless other blackouts and disruptive infrastructure failures. He’d also seen it connected to protests—the Times Square blackout being just the latest, after an uprising of migrant workers in Singapore, and the takeover of a brand-new, built-from-scratch, concept-art-perfect smart city by an army of protesters from the slums of Mumbai.

As is often the case, utopian revolutionaries are dismayed at what happens in real life, once they actually “win”. Civil wars occur around the globe. The former unconnected haven ends up turning into a scene of bloody conflict between the old guard government, and a group of outlaws. Basically everything is worse than it was before.

As one character puts it:

Your self-determination is a fucking power vacuum, that’s all it is. Your revolution, with no idea of what would happen next, just created a massive hole full of people fucking each other over to stay alive.

The impact on people’s material well being is most stark.  

She finds herself heading down the steps of a long-motionless escalator to the floor below, eager to explore, drawn to join in, wanting to experience what appears to be the decentralized, community-driven anarchic economy they’d spent so many late, stoned, enthusiasm-soaked nights dreaming of…

Instead, standing in the silence of the first shop she passes, she finds inevitable disappointment. For a start, the nameless store has barely any stock, and what is here is a disorganized mess of broken, discarded junk piled up in boxes or spread randomly around the half-bare shelving—at first glance she thinks it could even be the ramshackle debris left over from the original store’s ransacking, but soon she realizes the truth is even more depressing. For that to be true there’d have to be some shred of purpose, form. Between embarrassed glances she starts to think that maybe it’s just her own deep-rooted, bred-in consumer expectations clouding her assessment, so she tries to throw them aside and embrace the nonconforming landfill-mined chaos of scuffed plasticwear, broken crockery, torn clothing, dead electronics, and crumbling paperbacks—but it’s impossible. There’s not just a lack of organization here, it’s a total absence of function, value.

People who had acquired a cargo ship ahead of the crash go on a tour of the world, and observe collapsed cities, and silent ports. Its an interesting commentary on global supply chains. They make everything so convenient, but are really quite fragile.

This was why the supply chains existed, in order to make transactions that logic dictated were most efficient on local scales work on global ones, through sheer size, brute force, cheap labor, and global inequality.

…pinnacle of human effort had been to create a largely hidden, superefficient, globe-spanning infrastructure of vast ships and city-size container ports—and all to do nothing more than keep feeding capitalism’s hunger for the disposable. To move plastic trash made by the global poor into the hands of hapless, clueless consumers. A seemingly unstoppable beast built from parasitic tentacles, clenching the planet with an iron grip.

The crash has an irreversible impact on relationships, especially those that are long distance:

He sits there for a minute, in silence. It’s the first time they’ve been forcibly disconnected like this, and it’s jarring. Like they’ve been ripped apart, like he’s lost control. Suddenly the frailty of their relationship feels exposed, like it’s utterly reliant on this vast global infrastructure that he doesn’t own or control, that’s too complex for any one person to understand, that could break or disappear without even a second’s notice. He could lose him completely, just at the flick of a switch, at the typing of a command.