Not since the taught-nerved days of the Cold War has the world been closer to another confrontation between the globe’s major powers, yet never has our civilization (East, West and in-between) been so vulnerable to the existential disruption such a conflict would present.
Unlike previous globe-spanning conflicts, the vast expanses of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans will not provide safe barriers to our shores; the advent of missiles and aircraft that can leap those bounds in barely a blink of the eye has assured us of that disturbing fact.
But perhaps the greatest danger humanity faces today lies not in the threat of nuclear conflagration, although that unthinkable possibility is being increasingly bandied about by those with access to the red buttons—most notably Russia’s mad czar Vladimir Putin, but rather in the world’s ever-growing dependence on a remarkably fragile internet.
The internet was originally designed as a failsafe communications network, ARPNET, which linked military and civilian centres through a network of connections that could withstand attacks that would destroy key centres. That ARPNET was something of a con job perpetrated against the military industrial complex by the scientific community is somewhat irrelevant in the 21st Century. The tentacles of the internet have grown to become inextricably linked to every facet of our lives here in the West.
Entertainment, communications and, most critically, the logistics (and by extension economies) of our modern world all depend critically on those bits and bites moving uninterrupted between terminals. Without the internet, we would lose access to our money (who among us has a plethora of bills, coins and gold bars on hand?), be cut off from our friends and relatives (who still has a land line, and even if they do, that system is now just as internet-dependent as Facebook messenger) but most importantly, the distribution networks that supply us with food, drink and medicines would come to a crashing halt.
The recent example of the failure of just a tiny portion of the communications systems that our modern world depends on, the CrowdStrike update fiasco, has provided the world with a harbinger of what would happen should the net itself ever be brought down in a serious way. In this more benign of events, travellers were stranded in foreign lands, shoppers were unable to access their debit or credit cards, businesses were unable to find where in the chain their merchandise is stored.
Just about every industry on the planet is run on a “just in time” agenda. Materials, supplies and tools appear at the head of the assembly line at the moment they are needed, and not a day before. Grocery stores do not have any significant storage space, not even the mega-stores such as the Costcos and Walmarts of our world, to meet any sustained demand. What you see on the shelves is basically what the store has for sale. If the trucks do not come in to resupply the shelves, those shelves are soon emptied—not in months, weeks or even days—it will happen in a matter of hours or would happen if people could access their money in the event of a collapse of the internet.
In days of old, mining families would keep a massive pantry stocked with non-perishables in the event of a labour disruption and the vagaries of the market. Who does that anymore? If those stores shelves are suddenly empty, what will we feed our children?
This is not at all an unthinkable possibility. Although the internet was originally conceived and built to withstand such a threat, the all-too-hidden truth is that corporate economic priorities, tech laziness and poor planning have resulted in a much more vulnerable system, just as the world has become utterly dependant upon its robustness.
In a global conflict, the internet will be among the first targets the West’s enemies will target. And we are doing far too little about it. In fact, what little backup we had in place, notably the copper lines of the near-impervious North American telegraph system were pulled down from their poles just a couple of decades ago.
The shortwave radios of the amateur HAM radio operators, although vital to emergency services in a local region outage, would not prove to be anywhere near up to the task of replacing the vast number of communications necessary to even keep the bare necessities of life flowing to our communities.
As our nation looks toward climbing up to the two percent NATO defence commitment so concerning to the nation’s premiers, putting in place a robust communications alternative to the internet and alternate plans to ensure critical supplies can be delivered to communities should be one of the focusses of that spending. It’s a prudent thing to do.
