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I'm not sure I buy looking at the numbers of poor people without indoor plumbing but with internet access tells you about what they would actually prefer all things being equal. Internet access seems much cheaper to get and maintain access to than indoor plumbing, both in terms of monetary cost and also infrastructure.

Assuming you don't have indoor plumbing, you need to add more rooms onto your house (or take indoor space away). You also need to plumb both the water supply and the drainage system into your space, which if you're lucky you can already get under your house, and if not requires digging up the floor and foundation. And if you're doing this solo (a la a well and a septic system or similar) you need to acquire the necessary skills (electrical, plumbing, drainage management) and build it all out. I'm not a waste disposal expert, but I suspect the nature of indoor plumbing sending all waste water to the same location makes just running a big pipe to your existing outhouse (assuming you have enough downhill slope) not a good idea. A big hole that can handle the amount of human waste a few people produce is probably would not do great adding a bunch of additional waste water to it every day too.

By comparison, internet can be had with little more than a phone. In fact if you have a wireless phone at all, you probably have internet access, wether or not you intended to get it. And that applies to the homeless people the article mentions too. Let's ignore the fact that a person that is homeless by definition has no home in which to put indoor plumbing, there are also often programs, charities and NGOs providing cell phones and internet connectivity. Basic internet access could be had for $25 / month. I can't think of anything a homeless person could spend $25 on that would secure them indoor plumbing access for a month. Maybe a gym membership? Then again, your internet provider isn't likely to kick you out and call the cops, but a gym might if they catch on that you're just here to shower and use the toilets every day.

"No indoor plumbing" would make life functionally impossible in apartment buildings, condos, and suburbs - and at least in the US, a lot of people live in places like that.

I suppose you could take an elevator down multiple floors and then climb into your car to drive to the nearest outhouse any time you need to use the bathroom, but that seems unreasonable to me. So I think in practice "no indoor plumbing" means "a different structure of life", similar to the rural plot of land I spent part of my childhood on with well water, a septic system, and no official fire department or police department. (We had 56k dialup though!)

The point of this article feels like "we've made life without the internet really difficult", which is true, but we use indoor plumbing dozens or hundreds of times a day - washing our hands before handling food, washing our dishes, going to the bathroom, taking a shower, washing clothes, preparing food, having a drink. Its impact on hygiene and general quality of life is hard to overstate and any amount of time spent camping should drive this home I think. The author seems to have actually spent long periods of time without indoor plumbing though, so maybe they just love that lifestyle.

In comparison, sure, the modern person uses the internet a lot, but most of that time is spent doing inessential stuff like browsing social media or sending work emails. If the internet was gone you just wouldn't have those things and you'd go back to, IDK, the radio, newspapers, and typewriters.

Props to the author for keeping Robert's question alive.

Interesting. So basically an individual out in the sticks can genuinely get by with Internet but not plumbing, but urban life would be impossible at scale without plumbing, and without urban civilization at scale we probably wouldn’t be able to maintain the internet at scale?

Correct. At the risk of stating the obvious, indoor plumbing (and public sanitation in general) is not something required for you as an individual. It's something required for society as a whole to sustain value added activities that require dense urban areas without debilitating epidemics wiping out productivity (and any other measure of well-being) in those urban areas.

Always how it shows up too: someone says "I've been camping and it was fine".

That's not what a lack of indoor plumbing is like though. In fact going camping when indoor plumbing exists isn't even the same: when it's a few enthusiasts digging holes sparsely is very different to when the entire population is doing it.

It's also interesting to consider that most commercial data centres depend on plumbing for aircon or even direct water-cooling. Therefore depending how far you take this, it could result in an internet that exists, but with a limited set of services (as they can only be self hosted, or at least not at the huge scale we are accustomed to).

Depends on what you consider "plumbing" I suppose. People can live in dense housing carrying containers of water into their living space for cooking and cleaning, and using chamberpots for most elimination. It has some obvious downsides, but it works.

One counterpoint I can think of: most forms of electronic payment require the Internet now. Credit card transactions, Venmo et al. You could transition back to cash but there would be enormous switching costs and short-term chaos, and I could imagine paper-based transactions are also way less efficient in terms of transaction fees and literal loss of the cash.

> You could transition back to cash but there would be enormous switching costs

How much of a switch this would be depends a lot on the country: in quite some countries cash is the common method for payment:

> https://www.forex.se/en/travel/forex-index/cash-index/

> https://dailypassport.com/countries-that-still-rely-on-cash/

> https://www.travelex.com.au/travelex-hub/travel-inspiration/...

I think we're imagining a scenario where the internet never existed, not one in which it disappeared suddenly

Though, if we were going to discuss the "disappear suddenly" scenario, losing indoor plumbing seems even more horrifying...

Have to agree, Internet over Indoor Plumbing, since I spend the great majority of my time on the internet vs the toilet. That might be easier for me as I was toilet-trained in a household that used an outhouse containing the infamous "thunderbox".

> I spend the great majority of my time on the internet vs the toilet.

¿Por qué no los dos?

https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/man-sits-toilet-bowl-laptop-...