hops just have to be closer.
It doesn’t take much of a leap of imagination to see a torrent-like system utilizing all available devices within earshot to spread the bandwidth around to realize a pretty fast system available nearly everywhere in dense urban areas and slower (but ubiquitous) coverage the more rural you get. Obviously we’re far away from that now, but this definitely seems like the future to me.
I believe this stuff is going to be huge. Reticulum, Lora, Meshtastic all bit players now in a drama that has yet to get a finished script. It will start out as a supplement to the Internet, allowing you connectivity even when your Internet falters and as it becomes more ubiquitous, it will be increasingly used/usable and increasingly important. It can’t be shut down, it can’t be controlled. A country would literally have to ban radio signals of any kind in order to shut it down. It’s free. Buy the hardware, use the network, because you are the network. I love this.
I’m in the “been working with Linux since the 90s” gang so I call vim vi and nano pico and when I started there was a coolness factor to be considered. I was incredibly uncool so I used whatever I wanted, including pico - I mean you used pine for email back in the day and the interface was nearly identical, so whatever.
But I did want to be at least a tiny bit cooler, so I learned vi in a fairly rudimentary fashion. I can edit, jump, delete, search, replace, copy and paste - oh, and I can exit. I’ve spent so much time using vi, that my brain doesn’t even have to think about exiting, not even whether I want to write or not. It just happens like second nature. It’s actually gotten to where nano seems unduly burdensome to me.
But really, I prefer an IDE for programming. CLI editors will always be for configuration files and shell scripts to me.
It would only happen because of their sense of self-preservation. They can build all the bunkers they want but there is no way to be completely independent of the giant external machine that keeps us all alive. Even if you were a nihilist like your average billionaire, you can’t just say fuck everybody else, I got mine. You depend on food being grown and delivered, you depend on drugs being made and doctors and dentists to fix you up. You depend on a billion people not actively seeking your death. You depend, most of all, on money not being worthless. If nobody has money but you, then you also have no money.