This was a short story written by Corey Doctorow. -When the Sars2-cov pandemic, followed by quarantine became part of our lives --a short story from science fiction came to mind--. The story is part of his book call Overclocked. I think he may have made a short story into a novel. I have to check it out.
The story had to do with computer nerds known as system administrators or Sysadmins and it was written originally in 2005. The plot is about a virus that was part of a bioweapon and of course it affected the whole world; the system administrators that didn't die because they were in clean rooms where the ventilation system filtered the air to avoid servers from being damaged by outside pollutants and humidity. Many sysadmins were safe but now they deal with other issues like maintaining the internet in spite of the disaster that was occurring.
In the real world what keeps the world going on communication-wise would be in Hands of amateur radio (HAM). Unfortunately in this story, they are dead. Because the world was affected by a bio-weapon the infrastructure remains the same so from the author's point of view the internet will be the sole device to keep communications going for the survivors of the bio-weapon attack. The sysadmins create a digital state to keep the world going. In any event the short story it's so close to what's happening now it almost seemed incredible. But that is the idea of Science Fiction, to tell a story about science in a layman fashion.
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