If hackernews, youtube and reddit all went down for a month, our GDP would go up 2x.
Some people are paid to be available on demand, not to continually produce output. Somtimes we pretend that its not and come up with some busy work, but most of the time you are cheper to have on a payroll than to hire consultant on demand. So tou spend some of the time idling in HN.
God bless consultants and their hefty fees for keeping me employable.
If that happened, we would all go back to blogging and web rings. Don't doubt the laziness of office workers.