In 1909, E.M. Forster, author of “A Passage to India” and other joyful classics, wrote a novella entitled “The Machine Stops.” He pictured a world in which face to face communication had died out. People lived underground, and sat at their desks all day communicating with a circle of friends through terminals. HUH? WHAT? Did Mr. Forster borrow a time machine from H. G. Wells and visit 2013, landing in the basement of somebody’s mother’s house to see her hairy, slovenly, unwashed son seated in front of a PC, munching Fritos, slurping 5-Hour Energy, and hacking Fort Knox? NO. Mr. Forster was a smart guy, and cleverly extrapolated what he had observed that the just-invented telephone had done, id est, that it had reduced face to face communication to nonexistence. Forster goes on to describe the consequences when the universal machine that controlled everything from telecommunications to your toilets (Sound familiar, folks? Internet controlled electric toilets, stoves, can openers, right?) began to break down. In the end, everything breaks down: toilets refuse to flush, heat and air-conditioning cease, and everybody croaks except the few brave souls who had rejected the technological civilization and had gone to live above ground, enjoying fresh air and fresh meat which they had hunted down and killed themselves, preferably with their own teeth.

So, the question is: will we suffer the same fate? Have we become so interconnected, gridded, texted. facebooked, twittered that when the Web expires, we will all go down with it?

Probably.

But we will have fun while it happens, won’t we? Look, the original god of texting, Blackberry (almost, but not quite. RIP) has suffered a few world-wide outages, but the only people it really discomfited were lawyers, and that’s a net plus. So what will the upside be when the entire Web goes down permanently, perhaps through an EMP produced by a North Korean or Iranian (or Chinese, or French, or British, or Israeli, or Pakistani, or Indian, or Californian) nuke detonated a few miles above Dubuque?

To begin with, we can stop paying bills … ANY bills! All the accounting data supporting those annoying monthly demands for payment will have been reduced to random bits. WE ALL GET A FRESH START, AND WE KEEP EVERYTHING WE ALREADY HAVE! YAY!

We can stop paying taxes. The IRS databases, the faceless leash that holds us all in thrall, will have been erased. THEY WON’T BE ABLE TO AUDIT YOUR RETURNS, especially the 2010 return on which you claimed Aunt Sally’s pig as a dependent, and deducted the cost of those lap dances in Vegas as a medical expense.

We can create as many identities as we like, since there will be no way to cross-check them. So we can be bigamists, or trigamists, or quatramists, or whatever, with a spouse in every port. And we can aboandon them whenever we want. No child support! Whooppee!

Of course, I must admit, there may be  a downside, too. If you live in a major city, you will starve to death or be slaughtered by crazed, starving mobs, because the system that brings food from flyover country to the sophisticated locales inhabited by the excessively civilized will have collapsed. Unless you follow the storied example of the Donner party, and perfect your skills as a cannibal.

Yum.