Super nice idea. I remember when I was very young and the Internet was also young, maybe just two, three years, I experienced something strange. In this time we still used US-Robotics 56k modems to connect to the Internet. When I was offline my computer felt dead. Worthless. Useless. Only when I was online my computer felt right and I felt good.
You have to imagine that I loved my self-built PCs even before the Internet came. I spent so much time with them, upgrading them, spent night and day installing and trying new software, stuff like Sierra and Lucasfilm Adventures, Clipper/dBase, Turbo Pascal, QuarkXPress, Corel Draw, saving for hardware such as PostScript laser printers, AdLib later Soundblaster soundcarfd, SyQuest harddrives, flatbed scanners, all the typical stuff. And once the Internet came an offline computer felt like a dead computer.
I remember talking to somebody about this ages ago. I said exactly the same thing, a computer that is offline is of no use to me. Like a big expensive paperweight. That was also back in dial-up times with a 64k connection... (We had ISDN back then and i felt like a king when i discovered you could use both of our Channel Sand double the download speed! I was also pretty young back then...)
The thing is, we didn't even have internet access at home that long at that point. The transformation of my computer from a box of wonder without any connection, which i could spend hours in front of, to a mere gateway to the net, which seemed useless without connection, was very rapid and basically hasn't reverted to this day.
Needless to say i'm a pretty heavy internet user and smartphones with mobile connectivity have definitly taken that to another level. And i can't say that my attention span has benfited from that... These days I try to use the web less and get back to offline activities like reading books again.
You have to imagine that I loved my self-built PCs even before the Internet came. I spent so much time with them, upgrading them, spent night and day installing and trying new software, stuff like Sierra and Lucasfilm Adventures, Clipper/dBase, Turbo Pascal, QuarkXPress, Corel Draw, saving for hardware such as PostScript laser printers, AdLib later Soundblaster soundcarfd, SyQuest harddrives, flatbed scanners, all the typical stuff. And once the Internet came an offline computer felt like a dead computer.