# Matter & Maybe Research Notes

## What If the Internet Vanished for Seven Days?

Status: In production
Last prepared: 11 August 2026

This investigation follows a severe but deliberately defined scenario: the public internet is unavailable for seven days, while electricity, local radio and isolated private systems continue wherever they can.

The film is not a prediction. It is a stress test—following the dependencies between communication, payments, logistics, healthcare and public trust to discover where disruption becomes crisis.

## Evidence, inference and imagination

### Evidence: Communications resilience is regulated infrastructure

UK providers are expected to identify, prepare for and reduce risks to network availability.

Sources: Network and Service Resilience Guidance

### Inference: Payment failure would be uneven

Different merchants, banks and local systems would exhaust offline fallbacks at different times.

Sources: Operational resilience of the financial sector

### Imagination: Seven days without the public internet

The total global outage is a deliberately constructed cinematic stress test, not a forecast.

Sources: Cinematic scenario

### Inference: Certainty becomes scarce

When authoritative digital channels fail, decisions increasingly depend on local information and trust.

Sources: Network and Service Resilience Guidance; UK Food Security Report: Food supply-chain resilience

## Sources

- Ofcom: Network and Service Resilience Guidance
  https://www.ofcom.org.uk/internet-based-services/network-security/resilience-guidance
- Bank of England: Operational resilience of the financial sector
  https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/financial-stability/operational-resilience-of-the-financial-sector
- Bank of England: Operational resilience for recognised payment systems
  https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/paper/2026/ss/operational-resilience-rpsos-ssps-ss
- UK Government: UK Food Security Report: Food supply-chain resilience
  https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/united-kingdom-food-security-report-2024/united-kingdom-food-security-report-2024-theme-3-food-supply-chain-resilience

## AI production disclosure

Every element of the film is created with AI under human creative direction. These notes separate published evidence from inference and cinematic imagination.

## Corrections

No factual corrections recorded.