I am feeling seriously depressed about this, and also Reflect Orbital's no doubt similarly infuriating response that's due in a couple of days. I'm not sure what I expected, I guess I'm just not cynical enough to deal with current reality yet. Kessler Syndrome, here we come!!

@sundogplanets Kessler Syndrome now features in a near-future dystopian setting that I'm working on, though we don't really see how it impacts the world as a whole—in this setting, the collapse of the United States into smaller confederations has disrupted the availability of broadband, especially since at least one of the Big 4 telecom companies has completely fallen apart. So the internet exists, but people in this region can no longer reach it.

@sundogplanets I've been playing around with how that affects things like media availability, when devices are still common but most can't play physical discs. Working blu-ray/DVD players are now worth a lot of money; the people who had media ripping setups are now renting USB sticks with movies on them. We're basically back to sneakernet. Analog-to-digital conversion is particularly prized, because the only copy of a TV show in a 100-mile radius might be somebody's old VHS tape.