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What sort of situation would the world be in now if the internet had never been made available en masse to the public? Either through not being released by the government on security reasons, or not being invented.

The obvious assumption is that it would mean truly vast changes in economic and social and political terms around the world. A lot of economic growth has depended on the internet... so maybe the last two decades would be a period of a "cold" and stagnating economy, unless something else received enough capital investment to pick up the slack. Politically spekaing rebellions like the Arab Spring wouldn't be so successful, candidacies like Obama/Dean/Paul wouldn't be able to gain footholds, and we wouldn't see the populist polarizing influences of grassroots internet politics- instead politics would remain the domain of elitist and more moderate media.

As for the social effects... whoah. It's beyond me to even hypothesize how culture might have shifted over the past two decades without the internet, since internet has been the most notable cultural shift. I think though it would be a more conservative and constrained culture, since the internet has been an enabler of "hedonism"(not condemning that, but I can't think of a better term) such as porn.

Of course my capacity to understand what it would be look like is limited since it has been released for my entire lifetime. Anybody with memories from before it can probably give more substantive contributions to this thread.
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