Nobody Listens Anyway

A long time ago people figured out that if you used coins for trading instead of chickens you could build up a complex economy. The coins usually consisted of something precious themselves. Not to long ago society moved towards a more abstract notion of currency and found it was easier to produce dollars [...]

By total chance I found this article about the internet failing in two continents.  This hurts the economy of several Middle Eastern and African countries which sucks.  Wasn’t the point of the internet to create a distributed communications network that could withstand a nuclear war? What happened?