Great Plateau

The **Great Plateau**, sometimes referred to as the Great Regression, is an approximately thirty year era of human history in which technological progression significantly slowed down and in some cases, completely halted. It is generally agreed to have been initiated by the shutdown of the Internet in 2038 through an incident of cyberterrorism.

The internet was mostly revived and recovered by 2049 under the new ideology of Privatism. In the same year, multiple fields such as artificial intelligence, quantum mechanics, and fusion power experienced massive breakthroughs.

## Death of the Net

On October 11, 2038, a cyberterrorist group known as Ar3s shut down the Internet using a technique now known as the Aretian technique, which effectively overloaded Internet servers and shut many off completely, and completely disturbing many basic functions, including power. In the chaos of that day, a state of emergency was declared in the United States, as stocks markets closed trading, the National Guard was deployed to maintain order, and the near fabric of American society nearly collapsed.

### Effects

By early 2039, most basic services had been brought back, however, the Death of Net had taken its tolls. 1,247 people were directly killed because of the incident. When documents regarding the incident had finally been unclassified by the CIA in 2097, it had been revealed nearly 70,000 pages worth of US intelligence had been leaked to foreign powers.

Around 64% of the "Old Internet", the internet before the Death of the Net event survived. Most of the losses account from the Darknet. The surviving websites never truly recovered and most were shutdown in 2077, being left as archives/artifacts of the past for future users to uncover.

With the temporary loss of the internet, the disc industry, toy industry, theater industry, and television industry were almost nearly revived to their extent in the 80s and 90s. Disc rental stores, such as Blockbuster, made a remarkable come back. DVR sets also made a comeback. With the revival of the disc industry, a successor to the BluRay (the dominant disc of the 2010s and 2020s) was developed by , called .

The PC industry, almost entirely reliant on the internet for games, and Steam died, with indie developers as well as former PC developers completely making the move to video game consoles. The Death of the Net also killed the smartphone industry, that was recovering from the Mobile Gaming Crash of 2026, and helped to boost handheld gaming consoles.

Credit cards and cash money, once at risk of being replaced by digital wallets and cryptocurrency, maintain their dominance. This is thanks to paranoia of another crash, leaving cryptocurrency and digital paying practically dead amongst the average citizen.

E-commerce crashed along with the internet, resulting in a recession starting in 2039 and ending in 2040. Most major e-commerce companies didn't survive, Amazon and Alibaba being key examples. In 2041, Amazon declared bankruptcy and by the summer of 2042 was liquidated. Out of the ashes came Zappos, once an Amazon subsidiary, which adopted the AmazonGo brick-and-mortar stores and fitted them into Zappos stores. Whole Foods also became an independent entity again. The former headquarters of Amazon and Alibaba were taken over, and refitted into malls, named after their former owners. The most prominent being the Amazon Heritage Mall in Seattle, and the Jack Ma Alibaba Mall in Hangzhou. Unlike Amazon and Alibaba, e-auctionhouse eBay actually survived but went under numerous changes and was eventually bought out by in 2043. It was renamed to EZAuction in 2046, and in 2048, it opened its first physical operation, completing the transitioning from an online auctionhouse to a physical auctionhouse chain.

Some retailers that later turned solely to e-commerce, such as H. H. Gregg and TigerDirect, made their own comeback and reopened several stores. Although the few that did come back maintains a more local or regional presence, H. H. Gregg in particular managed to make a decent comeback, and re-established over 150 stores across Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland. H. H. Gregg in particular also brought back their old mascot, and had it featured in their commercials again, which played a part in their return to physical stores again.

A major event occurring as a result of the Death of the Net was the Great Reunion, mostly during the late 2030s and early to mid 2040s. It refers to a mass return of Centennials (Gen Z) to their childhood towns to reconnect with lost friends. This happened primarily as a result of the collapse of social media, that came with the Death of the Net, and thus lost of communication over a large area. This also is attributed to the return of landline phones to dominance.

The culture of the 2040s is often called a hybrid of 2010s nostalgia, and return to elements of 70s-90s culture.