What happens if Facebook shuts down?

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Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been steadily churning an idea over in my head: What would happen if Facebook died? What would the world be like if you woke up one day, rolled over to check your smartphone, and found that Facebook simply didn’t exist?

On an microscopic scale, you might’ve experienced something similar in the past, when it was quite common for your Facebook account to be inaccessible due to a bug or ongoing maintenance. It’s jarring to be disconnected from your friends, loved ones, and painstakingly fabricated digital ego — but you calm yourself with the knowledge that the outage is only temporary. On the other hand, though, you hear harrowing stories of people who have had their Facebook accounts banned (or Gmail accounts deleted), and how they have lost years of photos, memories, and messages. What would happen if you scaled this effect up to almost a billion people?

Would there be an outcry of monumental proportions, followed by some kind of pitchforked rush on Facebook HQ? Or would it be more like a veil being lifted from the collective consciousness, with a billion people blinkishly emerging into the Real World for the first time in years? I suspect it would be the former.

A better question to ask, though, is whether Facebook could actually be shut down. I don’t mean physically — Zuckerberg could obviously pull the plug at any time — but, more ideologically, is Facebook too large and important to fail? I mean, very few people would argue that the internet itself is a necessity of everyday life — some countries have even gone as far as declaring internet access to be a human right — and, more and more, Facebook is becoming the internet for many people. In 2011, Americans spent around 30% of their online time on social networks and blogs, with Facebook making up the vast majority of that. A further 10% of online time is spent playing games, most of which will have been Facebook-based Zynga games. In many respects, Facebook has become the spiritual successor to the AOL Browser, which for a large percentage of surfers — back in the ’90s, at least — was the internet.

Unlike AOL’s walled garden of yore, though, Facebook has weaseled its way into the very fabric of the web. If you shut down AOL at its peak, you would have a bunch of upset users, but they wouldn’t have actually lost anything except their email. If Facebook ceased to exist, you would lose messages, photos, friends, business connections, and a whole slew of other things. Just like when a hard disk dies, you would be forcibly separated from a large portion of your digital livelihood if Facebook closed.