"I ignored the flashes of lightning all around me. They either had your number on them or they didn't."
I have Luddite tendencies.
They're only tendencies. I don't bury silver in the yard or refuse to use an ATM or keep my money in a mattress because the banking system is all hokum, I tell ya. My preparations for Doomsday thus far consist of getting drunk and waiting for Thunderdome. Hell, a few months ago I even got an iPhone.
Nonetheless I have never been able to shake the fear that the technological edifice on which modern society is built is vulnerable to collapse. I have done all my banking online for the better part of a decade. It's convenient. But it also worries me – that nightmare scenario where we all wake up one morning and everything is just…gone. It's in the back of my mind.
There is nothing to be gained by giving in to the fear and becoming a cash-only person with a stuffed mattress. If society collapses because electronic data and the networks that move it about collapse, your cash dollars aren't going to be worth shit anyway. Neither is your silver. The best currency to have will probably be whiskey or gasoline. So I bank online and shop online and store my students' grades online and keep in touch with 100 different people online and get all of my news about the world online. Like everyone else under the age of 65, I am nearing the point at which I do essentially everything online.
Sidebar: I barely understand how the internet works. I've asked people to explain it to me like I'm five years old many times. At this point I kind of get it. A little. The basics. But there's something about it I just don't get in the same way that some people don't get calculus or Latin or Trace Adkins. That said, I have worked the problem and made improvements.
I just read The Worm by Mark Bowden (recommended) so it is possible that I have been swayed by a viewpoint held only by alarmists and Chicken Littles. Nonetheless, it paints a very plausible set of scenarios – plausible not meaning imminent or even likely, but merely within the realm of realistic possibility – for the exploitation of the security vulnerabilities of the thing we call the internet. Worms, viruses, and other malicious creatures could, in skilled but nefarious hands, bring the internet to a grinding halt. We're lucky in the sense that most "hackers" (remember when that was a thing?) are interested solely in making money when they engineer viruses and cast them out into the world.
But despite the author's caveats, the book leaves the distinct impression that someone – a hostile nation, a non-state group, a "Let's watch the world burn" nihilist – could engineer a much more disastrous outcome by exploiting any of a number of vulnerable points in the system.
People like to joke about what would happen if the internet stopped working. Imagine everyone flipping out when they can't check Facebook! Ha ha. Indeed, people would lose their marbles to an amusing extent if the sites we use to kill time online disappeared. The internet and the machines connected to it are more than just a means of delivering diversions though. They are our entire financial system. They are the power grid. They are air traffic control. They are distribution and delivery networks. It would be funny when we lost Facebook and TMZ. It would be less funny when we see the on-hand supply of food and fuel in major cities without a constant flow of incoming shipments.
Like most people, I deal with such thoughts – scenarios too terrible to comprehend fully and about which I can do nothing – by sticking my head in the sand. Thinking about such things would drive me nuts (moreso). There are steps, theoretically, that could be taken to prevent malicious attacks on the internet, not all of which are taken and none of which are 100% effective. So the risk is like that of getting on an airplane. You know the plane is probably safe, but you also know goddamn well that if today's the day that both engines take bird strikes or one of your fellow passengers smuggles a bomb on board, there's really nothing you can do. You're screwed, and that's that.
That is what I mean by Luddite tendencies. I'm not technology averse, but I am wary. I know that the internet is awesome and convenient in the same way that flying is.
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And I know that like flying, when something goes wrong it is likely to go horribly, catastrophically wrong with dire consequences for everyone on board. Most of me loves the internet, and the other part of me is the one that thinks it is amazing that our luck has held even this long.