this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2026
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.

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I think it will simply become impossible to keep digital payment systems secure. The whole online economy will collapse. Amazon will become worthless. People will actually have to go out to local stores to buy everything. People will have to go to their local bank or currency exchange to cash their paychecks. The credit card system will fail completely too, while payday loans will take their place. The stock market will have to go back to traders yelling their trades to each other at exchanges. The old ways will become new.

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[–] Flagstaff@programming.dev 12 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Amazon will become worthless.

Half of the Internet is run by AWS, Amazon Web Services. Even if the retail front entirely died, Amazon would still survive for decades at minimum, if not centuries.

[–] ChonkyOwlbear@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

That is true. AWS is the most profitable part anyway. I meant the digital storefront more than the company. But even AWS would take a hit because the companies that host with them wouldn't be able to sell either.

I think OP's scenario has bigger implications than just online banking. If AI systems can hack websites a thousand times faster than humans can patch them? Sure, you could have AIs try to patch the leaks themselves, but in a numbers game, it's always easier to play offense than defense. The hacker bots need only succeed once to compromise a system.

Imagine a world where the internet simply becomes completely unusable. Imagine a world where literally no login credential of any kind is safe. Any site accessible to the open internet becomes immediately hacked. Even if you just want to throw a completely inconsequential and profitless 1990s-style personal webpage to share your life and views, it still gets hacked. The minute you connect your site to the net, it gets taken over by a propaganda bot. The personal views you share now get subtly altered to push the bot owner's

How about something like Canvas, the learning management system used by many colleges and universities? That becomes unusable. Bots try to hack professor accounts so they can loot the content to train bots to apply for online teaching gigs. Student accounts get compromised, and then sit quietly. The night a big assignment is due, they hold your account hostage. Or students themselves can sign up for bots that will perform all the coursework for them for a tiny fee. Or anti-intellectual forces who just hate universities in general just try to shut the whole thing down. Or racist bots try to hack and subtly lower the grades of minority students. This is the world you have to imagine. Every system targeted by bot that can hack systems with superhuman skill, directed by people of every interest and grievance imaginable.

The open internet then becomes completely unusable. We're already seeing this with the "Dead Internet Theory," but that's mostly about social media and search results. We're talking about a future where even the content on the most known and vetted websites cannot be trusted. You can still have hard-wired local intranets that lack any remote or even wireless access. But anything that isn't entirely airgapped becomes immediately hijacked by nefarious interests with any number of evil intentions. What use is AWS in such a world? Who's going to pay money to host websites, when they're just going to immediately get taken over by hackers? Sufficiently advanced hacking bots effectively make the very concept of the Internet an obsolete technology.

And, the real the knife in the heart? How are you even going to run AWS in such a world? If every login can be hacked, that includes the AWS login. The instant you open an AWS account, and your payment details get used to host more botnets. And of course, in this scenario, how will you even pay for AWS's services, with online banking being completely compromised?

No, in OP's scenario, AWS is just as dead as everything else. AWS only exists because it's profitable to host things on the net. The minute that changes, AWS disappears. And in this scenario, even operating AWS becomes impossible.