I was reading a book, The Victorian Internet, which talked about how connected the Victorian era was, with wires stretching everywhere above the roads. It’s probably exaggerated, but it got me thinking. There are many ways to engage in en masse interconnectivity. Computers, of course, are one of them, but we also have had, for example, messenger pigeons, drones we can send to different places, search dogs with an interconnected sniff system (I forgot what that was called), etc.
Suppose you had a civilization. Maybe it’s on a planet whose environment interferes with the capabilities of a classic internet, or maybe it’s a normal fantasy setting where the classic internet is cursed. However, the civilization still needs some kind of apparatus of interconnectivity. What’s the best/closest thing you can think of as a replacement for the internet without it being the internet as we know it?
Cuba might be a good place to look for a real world example of this. They had the concepts of “SNET” and “el paquete semanal” that were solutions to poor internet penetration, expensive internet costs (pay per MB), and heavy restrictions on that internet.
El paquete semanal is a weekly payload of the latest movies, TV episodes, manga, comics, etc. that gets brought into the country and spread by sneakernet.
SNET is widespread guerilla LAN networking to the point where Cuba had a well populated private WoW server. Also solved some of the Internet cost issues because you could game and share content locally without paying for every little MB.
As of 2020, SNET is now “illegal” and those existing networks are being absorbed into their ISP.