It was truly a culture shock when the Government pulled the plug on the Internet. Citing “national security” concerns, the Feds halted all online activity several years ago. Without email, Facebook, the web, file transfer, online gaming, Netflix, Amazon, eBay, Google and more, the world changed in a heartbeat.

All the services we relied on were gone. Computers still worked, of course, as did the local networks, Yet, twenty-somethings who had never stuffed an envelope learned almost overnight how to print out a letter. The Post Office strained under the new load.

Newspapers roared back, as did books and magazines. People wanted to read, and paper was the only way to get the words to them. Silicon Valley may have suffered the brunt of the layoffs, but all over the country newspapers and magazines were hiring like crazy.

After a week or so, the Internet returned, but greatly curtailed. Some of the major sites were still there, but everything was slow. Rumor had it that the spooks installed heavy-duty monitoring equipment that filtered everything.

All of the mom-and-pop web sites were gone. Apparently there was a queue somewhere in some bureaucratic office in Washington. In the queue were hundreds of thousands of personal, private, and small business web sites waiting to be approved. Years later, most of them would still be waiting.

What happened in the meantime was good old Southern ingenuity.

Rumor had it that some college kids in Alabama devised the Anti-Internet. It didn’t use the fat pipes owned by the major corporations, and subsequently monitored and throttled by the Feds. No, those kids figured out how to create the Anti-Internet by using Wi-Fi.

One of the students took a tablet and walked from one end of the town to the other. All along the way, she spied Wi-Fi signals. Plotting them out on a chart, the kids discovered that the city was laced with Wi-Fi, covered like paint spilled from a bucket.

The Anti-Internet used all those Wi-Fi routers, connecting anyone who would volunteer with everyone else. It was eventually possible to send email across town simply by hopping from one Wi-Fi router to another. The same Internet protocol was used, but without DNS servers it took a few microseconds longer for traffic to find its destination.

The idea caught on. Eventually, Wi-Fi bridges connected one town with another. Soon, the Anti-Internet was available just about anywhere. Yes, it wasn’t the same as the old Internet, but it was something free and wild without the spy-snooping software. It may not be an adequate replacement, but it’s better than nothing.