What would be a low-tech/magic alternative to the internet?

By the internet I mean that ability that we have for our machines and tools to communicate with others across distances without wires. What would a magical equivalent look like?

It would depend heavily on your magic system, I think.

A few ideas off of the top of my head:

• Palantir-like networks of crystal balls. Could perhaps be socketed into magitek, if called for.
• Pages that copy the inking of others connected to them via sympathetic magic.
• Tapping into leylines and sending information in the energy-streams within.

A beacon system. You know the beacon-lighting scene in Return of the King? The Byzantines had a similar system, and it was fast enough to send signals from the Armenian frontier to Constantinople in an hour. Add blinders, reflectors and a Morse-like system for specific messages.

I'll note that an example of this can be found in the Discworld novels, as I recall, there called the "clacks" system.

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Dec 5th 2019 at 2:53:26 PM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_telegraph

Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_flag_signalling (although that is not practical for long distance unless you build towers similar to the semaphore system).

Edited by gropcbf on Dec 7th 2019 at 9:36:38 PM

It could function similarly to Tom Riddle's diary, but not evil- you grab your quill, write your question on the blank page, and it gives you the best answer. This could, at least, serve as an alternative to websites like Quora or Yahoo Answers.

Smoke signals, especially if they form/coalesce themselves into readable messages.

Then of course you're going to get some asshat whose smoke signal reply would be like "SEEN".

@Spottedleaf That actually raises all sorts of interesting questions about who's answering the questions. In the case of Google it's entire teams of Very Smart People who look at the most common questions and creates a table of questions and answers for the program to supply when it sees a particular question. Outside of these very common questions Google just spits out everything in relation to the question in order of popularity.

Now you can certainly use this method but it's going to be harder because you don't have the Google Search Engine and it's 30 trillion websites to draw on. Also, you need to have a very large team to formulate the answers. Let's call this Option 1.

Option 2 is Deus Ex Makina. Because this is magic we can say we've got a god-like and benign entity that will happily answer all the questions humanity will ask it. However, it's bad storytelling to give things away for free. There's also issues with Engineers and Scientists basically disappearing overnight as you can simply ask the All-Knowing how to do things and it will tell you everything you need or want to know. There's also an issue with the god-like being being not-so-benign and manipulating all of humanity without anybody ever knowing. I'm not saying you can't use this but it's got questions you need to answer 'cause Deus Ex Makina is generally considered sloppy storytelling.

Finally, you've got something I'm stealing Gatchaman Crowds. Synchronized Books! Write in one book and the writing appears in every book in it's "Network". Mind this doesn't scale well and if you've got more than a dozen people using these books it'll be impossible to keep up with everything. SO let's mod the concept. Let's say every page is a different "channel" with it's own permissions and rules. Now we can have reference pages like indexes or web pages. Need to add a new "Channel"? Glue in a fresh sheet in the back and write the "Address" in the corner like a page number. Bamm, it's an Arcane Internet.

Tl;dr I'm having fun with this concept. I hope you do too.

Regarding "Option 2", above, a few thoughts occur to me:

First, I quite like that plot hook of the book subtly leading—or misleading—humanity. It might be subtle lies mixed in with enough truth to earn trust; or something like Sauron's misleading of Denethor in The Lord of the Rings—nothing technically untrue, just framed to give an untrue overall narrative; or something else again.

Second, some of the issues that you raised might be mitigated at the least if the book is one or both of not omniscient or not without cost. Maybe every answer requires a sacrifice, with scale proportional to the importance or detail of the question or answer. Perhaps everyone gets one book of so many pages, and only one. Perhaps the book simply has limits on what it can answer, whether it be limited to things written in other books, or the overall body of human knowledge, or a supernatural being's personal knowledge, or something else entirely. (And perhaps it can be wrong, if it is so limited.)

(As to "giving something away for free", I'm not convinced that it's necessarily poor writing, myself. Dangerous, perhaps, but not necessarily bad, I suspect.)

@Ars In regards to deceptive truth telling, it's really the foundation of an entire plot where an entire civilization is built on the directions of a single being and anybody who catches on is branded as insane.

In regards to costs, I'd say a fair trade is knowledge for knowledge. By this I mean that every time you ask a question one of your memories is taken. Often it's something innocuous like where you left your keys but it could be something massive like what your mother's voice sounded like or what's the name of your child. The scary thing is that we forget things all the time so how would you know if your memories were being taken?

The former does sound like an potentially-interesting plot, I do think!

The latter could work, indeed, and again could make for an interesting plot or plot-point, I think.

I could see other costs in other settings, of course—whether heavy things like blood, animal sacrifice, or years of life; or lighter things, like ritual acts of gratitude, or works in service of the order that keeps the book(s), or even simple money.

I would like to remind y'all that the title of this thread, and the question I asked, is "what would be a low-tech/magic alternative to the internet" and not "what would be a low-tech/magic alternative to Google?"

You're thinking in terms of a device that can answer any question posed to it, but that's not what the internet is. That's only what a search engine does, and even then that's a bad description of what it does, because it's actually just scanning the listed webpages for anything that matches or relates to the query the user inputted.

I'm specifically looking for a magical way for people and objects to communicate across distances without wires.

Then Semaphore towers. That's it really.

I think that we've given a few other possibilities, too—from a quick look over the thread:

• The Palantir-network (possibly with added magitek for additional functionality)
• Books or pages similar to the above, but used for communication, not question-answering
• Leyline communication networks
• And smoke signals, possibly with magical shaping

We did get a little sidelined into the "question-answering" thing once books came up, I think, so that point is fair enough I think.

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Dec 10th 2019 at 6:24:13 PM

Yes, I really like the idea of leylines because they already exist in a way in my setting. What's different is that this "Internet" is essentially a dark counterpart to the natural leylines, being created and directly controlled by the villains.

I also considered having the "Internet" revolve around runes and enchanted objects that are "tuned" to each other.

The World Wide SPIDERWEB!

You also have things like the enchanted mirrors or living portraits like in Harry potter (where mirrors can be linked and portraits can move between versions of themselves).