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How Vulnerable Are Our Digital Systems? (Jeffrey Tucker)

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Fishrrman:
https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/how-vulnerable-are-our-digital-systems-5674221

How Vulnerable Are Our Digital Systems?
By Jeffrey A. Tucker
6/24/24

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Excerpts:
Last week a cyberattack hit a huge number of car dealers in the United States. The software designed by the company CDK was completely disabled, affecting the whole of an integrated process of purchasing and processing. Sellers could not process sales, loans, insurance, registrations, and much more. It happened suddenly, lasted two and a half days, came back, then went down again.

How did car dealers function? They wrote it all out on paper and pledged to complete the process after the systems came back. They are back and all seems well but the experience is a warning sign. These systems are far more vulnerable than anyone normally assumes. All it takes to shut down the modern world as we know it is a hack here and there. That’s an alarming realization.

The problem is that the technological revolution as we fashioned it 30 years ago gradually evolved in an ever more centralized way, wholly dependent on a weak and old-fashioned electrical grid of networks without much duplication or backstopping. The software too has become centralized for each industrial purpose. If one thing goes wrong in any system with a single point of failure, the whole comes to a grinding halt.

It’s amazing to consider that the old analogue world that lasted from the ancient world until the 21st century did not have this problem. It was more durable, physically anchored, fixable by human hands, comprehensible, and manageable. The move to digital everything introduced a fragility to the whole that we are only now discovering.
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You know this if you have been posting articles for a long time. I can go back to an article I wrote ten years ago, if I can find it and it is still there, and try out the links therein. Most of them are dead now, meaning that the main way in which writers once documented their claims is completely unworkable now. And then it all happened in such a short period of time. In the “world wide web” it turns out that most of the strands of the web are as vulnerable as a spider’s own construction in a storm. It falls apart under the slightest stress.

This leads to an astonishing realization. It is easier to dig up an article written in the 1920s or 1930s, or the 1880s for that matter, than anything posted online after 1995. In practice, the internet is not forever. It is temporary, gauzy, ephemeral, changing, and forever replacing the old with the new. This means that digital technology enables the constant replacing of one reality for another, which is amazing.

Some years ago, I wrote something like 300 articles and 30 book introductions for a company I assumed would be around forever. The company was not able to make it according to profitability metrics and was replaced.

I watched from one instant to the next with amazement as the entire infrastructure flipped from one domain to another that did not carry any of it over, and all the accounts where the books lived were suddenly deleted from one minute to the next. Two years of my own work was suddenly vaporized. This was not malice at work. It was just the reality of business: maintaining the legacy simply did not pay.
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It’s a terrifying thought that the whole of modern life hinges on such a thin foundation that can crack at any time, wholly changing reality in front of our eyes, taking down whole sectors, and disabling all functionality. We look back at the old days of analogue everything and consider it primitive but maybe that is completely untrue. Maybe it was far wiser to rely on systems that cannot break en masse and can be fixed by actual human beings when they break.

Many people worry about the implications of solar flares that can take down the internet in a flash. That is a legitimate concern. But the real threat is far more pressing and real. It is how any system can be hacked and compromised in any sector: car sales, real estate management, delivery systems, banking and finance, and payment processing. It can all be here today and gone tomorrow.
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You know who will thrive if the nightmare scenario actually comes to pass? The Amish, the Mennonities, family farms in rural areas, and other small communities that never went all-in with digital adoption. Maybe it was a mistake to toss out everything we knew from the industrial age and convert the whole world so suddenly to an ephemeral world built of 1s and 0s.

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