Something interesting happened this morning that made me think about the future of the street drug industry.

I woke up with the full intention of dragging my heels about taking the decorations down, as Epiphany is quite a bittersweet nostalgic time for me, and I’m usually not terribly enthusiastic about crossing over the threshold into That Which Is Not Christmas Anymore. While I was standing in the kitchen contemplating breakfast, however, I noticed that the electricity was off. Hmm. I guess the universe has ways of forcing the issue if there needs to be some time spent away from the internet.

I got the decorations put away, which took a little over an hour (we only have the tree and the stockings), and by the time I’d finished the electricity was still off. I could hear the crew downstairs working on whatever they were working on, and it didn’t sound like they were anywhere near done.

So I sat down and started reading a book. A real, paper book. Even my reading these days usually requires electricity, as books in English are not terribly easy to come by in Antalya, especially if you have a specific title in mind. So I buy ebooks, and I read them on my computer or my PDA— both of which require electricity, not to mention the electricity used to purchase the book in the first place.

When the power finally got switched back on, it was like someone had reconnected my limbs. Granted, I have a different situation than most people— I live far, far away, and without the internet I would have little to no contact at all with anyone from my home planet. But it still got me thinking about where this general trend toward electricity-dependent networks is going. I can certainly see a situation in which some people become reliant on the internet in the same way that some people are reliant on heroin. Perhaps there are people already in that vicinity of addiction, and like the early days of most class-A drugs, there’s nothing in the law to slow it down yet.

What happens when governments do start catching on? State-sanctioned down time, an organised program of Real-Life Thursdays or whatever, with access providers required to switch off a certain number of hours per week? Television as methadone, a way to get us off one box and onto another? Of course I’m being dramatic, but it does make you wonder if the drug dealers of the future will be supplying portable home generators and giving out the phone number of the guy who can hook you up to pirated access on Thursdays, when The Man tries to force you to go outside for a while.

Last week a friend of mine told me she read some poll where people said they’d rather go without sex for two weeks than go without the internet for two weeks. Personally, I don’t see the big scandal about that, unless you’re the kind of person who would normally be having sex several times a day. For many people, only having to go two weeks without sex would be an improvement on their current situation. But the internet, that is something we do several times a day, and not just for fun, either. Even in my little technology-challenged corner of the world, people use the internet for everything from paying the bills, to making the money to pay them. People work online, communicate online, and organise their lives online. It’s not all porn and Scrabble.

I don’t really have a point with this, other than to throw it out there. I’m not worried whether society is headed in the right direction, or predicting that we’ll all be slaves to our computers within the next decade. After all, if humans were any good at predicting accurately, we’d all have flying cars and robot maids by now. Personally, I’d rather go without the internet for two weeks than go without my flying car. Your mileage may vary.