the world. Either they would malfunction and spit out money or not work at all. If the second happens, people eventually starve, or more likely get food by illegal means because they canʼt get their cash. While it is far less likely, it would exponentially more interesting, if the first happens. In this case, people will fight, and probably kill for the free money being spat out that will ironically become worthless since money gets itʼs value from being scarce. Also, with most cars being run by computers, itʼs easy to imagine that those too will be rendered useless. Even if youʼve been holding on to that VW Bus or that Gremlin, and you know there are certainly no computers aboard your automobile, gas pumps will not work, so you will only be able to flee as far as a tank will get you. Based on my experience with old cars, it certainly isnʼt far enough to get you away from the widespread panic. Cell phones, televisions, and radios will be rendered useless (radios themselves will probably be fine, but the transmission towers and satellites wonʼt), which creates a pretty big problem for the general order of things. It is likely that what is happening will be impossible to communicate to the populace since most people have forgotten how to read smoke signals. This will obviously add to the panic as people wonder about the whereabouts of loved ones and what the hell is going on. While these individual technological failures can be scary, a computer outage of the networks and mainframes that control power grids will plunge the world into darkness and leave just about all technology useless. Once any, or all, of these go down it is a near certainty that people will start looting, pillaging and destroying. Itʼs just what people do. Once order is breached, the governments of the world may find it difficult to maintain civility because a coordinated response to suppress the violence relies heavily on the same communication devices that caused the chaos. It is hard to imagine this kind of event without massive amounts of death and possibly enough destruction to wipe out society as we know it. It wonʼt be pretty. The silver lining though, is you wonʼt have to hear people bitch about it on their Facebook. BRUNCH! MAGAZINE ISSUE #3: The Brunch After Tomorrow
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