According to New Scientist, there appears to be no official government plan for catastrophic internet failure, which has prompted about 150 volunteers including Linux legend Valerie Aurora and hacker Trammell Hudson to form the world’s only Internet Resiliency Club. The group recently gathered at a 15th-century café in Amsterdam to test Meshtastic devices that use unlicensed radio spectrum to send text messages across cities when traditional networks fail. These low-power devices can be solar-powered indefinitely and form mesh networks, but testing reveals they only work over hundreds of meters in cities rather than the claimed 10 kilometers. The volunteers are stress-testing whether these radios could help coordinate restoring basic services after an internet collapse, inspired by colleagues in Ukraine who’ve kept networks running during war.
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The bootstrap problem
Here’s the thing that keeps these experts up at night: how do you coordinate fixing the internet when the very tools you’d use to coordinate are broken? It’s what Aurora calls “the bootstrap problem.” Think about it – when everything goes down, you can’t email colleagues, can’t check Slack, can’t even look up phone numbers because they’re all stored in the cloud. We saw this exact scenario play out during power cuts in Spain and Portugal, where experts had satellite phones but couldn’t contact the right people because they had no hard copies of contact information.
And honestly, that’s the most terrifying part of all this. We’ve become so dependent on digital systems that we’ve lost the analog backups. I mean, when was the last time you actually memorized a phone number? The IRC volunteers are basically trying to rebuild those analog coordination systems using digital tools that don’t depend on the existing internet infrastructure.
Why low-tech might be our only hope
The Meshtastic devices they’re testing represent a fascinating approach – sacrificing capability for reliability. These aren’t fancy smartphones. They can’t handle video calls or even voice. We’re talking about basic text messaging that hops from device to device across a city. But in an emergency, that might be enough to say “meet at location X” or “power plant Y needs component Z.”
What’s clever about the Meshtastic approach is the solar power aspect. If the grid goes down along with the internet, these things could theoretically keep working indefinitely. But there are serious practical limitations. The volunteers found the range is dramatically less than advertised in urban environments – just hundreds of meters instead of kilometers. To cover Amsterdam, you’d need hundreds of these devices mounted on buildings, which presents its own nightmare of permissions and logistics.
The government planning vacuum
What strikes me as both concerning and completely unsurprising is that according to Valerie Aurora, there’s no evidence of any official plan for internet restoration. “If there is one, it’s successfully being kept secret from everybody who should know and who would implement it,” she told New Scientist. Given how critical the internet is to everything from banking to utilities to emergency services, this seems like a massive oversight.
We’ve seen similar planning gaps before. Remember when government cybersecurity agencies get hobbled during shutdowns? Or how unprepared many cities were for the shift to remote work during the pandemic? The pattern is clear – we tend to assume critical infrastructure will just keep working until it doesn’t.
The reality check
Let’s be honest though – could a volunteer group with hobbyist gear really restore the global internet? Probably not. But that’s not really their goal. As Trammell Hudson and the team recognize, the immediate focus is getting local critical services back online in a city like Amsterdam. Utilities, emergency coordination, basic communication between key technical people.
The real value here might be in proving the concept and creating playbooks that others can follow. Joe Abley makes the crucial point: “No backup is any good unless you test it.” The IRC’s experiments with impromptu picnics coordinated only through Meshtastic devices might sound silly, but they’re exactly the kind of realistic testing that’s missing from most disaster planning.
So while I’m skeptical that mesh networks will save civilization after a Carrington-level solar event, I’m genuinely impressed that someone is at least trying to figure this out. Because right now, the alternative appears to be crossing our fingers and hoping the internet never completely fails. And given how many threats are out there – from cyberattacks to climate disasters to solar storms – that seems like a pretty risky strategy.
