https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/the-fragility-of-the-digital-age-5933808The Fragility of the Digital Age
By Jeffrey A. Tucker
10/23/25
The outage is “catastrophic.” So arrived the message from a server that hosts a service that is important to my life. Seemingly out of nowhere, the world came to an end for a full day until power was restored.
What was the reason? I don’t know the particulars but it is usually always the same. An update in one software was inconsistent with another. A line of code got through that didn’t work as planned. Some third-party software stopped communicating with the main server. A cascade of effects followed that messed up everyone’s lives.
This is becoming more and more common. Two days earlier, all the servers hosted by Amazon went down. This wrecked countless social sites, financial services, airline reservations, and banks. Whole industries ground to a halt, and for exactly the same reasons.
Everything about the digital age works great until it doesn’t. Neither you nor I can fix it when it does break. We don’t likely know people who can. We are all vulnerable. Our hands are tied. We can only sit and wait for the administrators of the services to kick the machines, tug on the wires, revert the codes, reboot this and that, and otherwise somehow find out what’s wrong.
I was a server administrator in the early days so I have my experiences with outages. You are staring at black screens. So the mind begins to wander. The problem could trace to one of dozens of possible causes. Or maybe hundreds or thousands. Or millions.
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Everyone has stories like this. It is getting alarming. You take for granted that something works. Suddenly and seemingly out of nowhere, it does not work. You never quite recover your sense of security once you face this.
What can be done? Systems administrators can eschew total dependence on clouds and AI and adopt technology more slowly, building in redundancy at every stage. As consumers, we can be more attentive to preparing for the worst by reducing our reliance on digits. I will always choose analog over digital when possible.
A scene pops into my mind when thinking about this subject. It is the cobbler in my neighborhood who is still repairing shoes with machines made back in the 1920s. These machines have lasted 100 years and still get the job done. Nothing today is built this same way. We are on three-year cycles of buy and throw away. This is not a sign of genuine progress but the way the world ends.
Stock up on silver dimes and firewood. Meet some real farmers. Go back to physical locks. The time could come when you need them.
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