BEWARE LOVING THE INTERNET

I was surprised to see so little follow-up after reports last week in the New York Times about recent Russian naval activity around underwater internet cables. It said  “American military officials are concerned that Russia might be preparing to sever the communications lines in case of a conflict".

These fibre optic cables account for more than 95% of daily communications and financial transactions worth more than $10 trillion. In a world increasingly dependent on high-tech communications shouldn’t we be worried? Wasn’t the TalkTalk debacle a shot across the internet bows - even if the shot may have been fired from the pop gun of a 15 year old Irish hacker?  It seems the internet might be more vulnerable even than we’d thought. According to the magazine “Signal” a TechNet magazine which describes itself as “more than a magazine”, the main vulnerability is in the switchers and routers which can be overloaded in a cyber-attack. What would ensue would be the tech equivalent of “goodnight Vienna”.

The older you get, this Black Swan activity that Nassim Taleb describes becomes decreasingly surprising. The internet is a young entity cobbled together with no one in charge of it. In the early days of its existence French investors asked an American techie “who’s CEO of the internet?” Now, just 24 years after the Word Wide Web went live, the same question resonates even more strongly.

It’s the Wild West out there and something’s going to go wrong. A Russian, North Korean, Isis inspired or a freelance disruptive force will bring the infrastructure down. Think tech tsunami.  Now the reality of all this (which is culturally, technically and intellectually way beyond me) is that human resourcefulness, being what it is, this outage would be a serious but just a temporary blip not a long term catastrophe.

Nonetheless imagine the psychological damage first-generation- internet-dependents would suffer. This weekend Twitter suffered a series of outages over a twenty four hour period and   the woe that ensued from that was enormous.

Beyond these blips Twitter is discovering new problems. Its market capitalisation is around $20 billion yet its very existence is beginning to be questioned. Here’s what Caitlin Moran said - she’s the “columnist of the year.”

“Twitter promised access to a new global consciousness where we would have the dizzying thrill of hearing voices we’d never heard before. The reality is that it has ended up sounding like everywhere else. Except …nastier”

She called Twitter the global Town Square. Yes we used to have those where people like my Grand Dad might have said something apparently true….

“If the trees be in leaf on November the 1st
The winter that follows will be one of the worst”

Now just because it sounds plausible (or it appears online) don’t lazily believe it….question it. And don’t delegate your entire life and mind to an infrastructure so vulnerable to collapse. Imagine a world without the tyranny of technology.

I regard this (like Signal) as “more than a blog” but with more of a smile.