It’s difficult to shake off the feeling that human beings are getting distinctly worse at anticipating and acting to mitigate what seem to be pretty predictable ruptures in the status quo.
Much ink has been spilt on why we have been so collectively slow off the mark to address looming long-term threats vis-à-vis climate change.
But there are other issues that are much more immediate and obvious, whereas even the most ardent activist must acknowledge there remains a certain degree of uncertainty around just how accurate the modelling of the climate apocalypse actually is.
These musings were prompted by yesterday morning’s brief internet outage in Masterton, which affected a number of residents from Solway to Lansdowne, including the Times-Age offices.
It turns out it was caused by a glitch in planned work in the Chorus exchange as customers’ connections were transitioned from one POLT card to another.
Yeah, I don’t know really what that means either [apparently, it’s basically a cheap-as-chips microchip that translates data], but it served as a reminder of how increasingly reliant we all are on complex systems subject to inevitable failure, with consequences that range from the merely inconvenient to the potentially catastrophic.
While the internet is indeed an amazing enabler of an increasingly instantaneous on-demand society, isn’t it odd that there’s little to no redundancy being built into something that’s integral to the smooth operation of, well, just about everything?
And, indeed, one just needs to take a brief squiz at the technocratic fever dream for the future that’s promoted by the influential World Economic Forum [WEF] – and seems to be supported by the majority of Western governments – to conclude that we appear to be rapidly accelerating to a point when the entire edifice of our civilisation will be utterly dependent on the internet.
It doesn’t appear to have occurred to anyone that everything created by humans is subject to error and entropy.
One would’ve thought that events like the 2021 ransomware attack on the Waikato District Health Board, which saw services severely curtailed for months, might have spurred some galaxy brain or another to wonder whether forging ahead with adopting digital technologies that aren’t backed up with some analogue alternative might not be the best idea in the world.
But apparently not. Despite WEF founder and chairperson Klaus Schwab recently warning of the threat of a “global cyber-attack with covid-like characteristics”, such a possibility hasn’t made him pause in pushing his vision of a world in which every aspect – from autonomous cars to remote surgery – is empowered by an omniscient, interrelated ‘Internet of Things’.
If we all continue to ‘progress’ willy-nilly down this path, what are we going to do in the event of a serious system crash? Turn the world off and on again?
Closer to home, examples of such shortsightedness abound, but the way in which communications for emergency services were knocked out by Cyclone Gabrielle in many parts of the country will suffice.
It appears some organisational genius in emergency services thought it was a good idea to ditch radio-based communication networks for cheaper cell phones, not realising how vulnerable the cell system is to outages in extreme weather events.
Lesson now learned, radio is now back as a backup. One can hope such ‘learnings’ are applied more widely – and soon.
