Once a huge champion of all things digital, I’ve come to develop serious doubts about the pace at which humanity made the switch from analog to the cloud. The hackings, outages, data breaches, and extended breakages all make the point. But the danger is even greater.
Most of the things we use today have not been stress tested. They are centralized and have a single point of failure. And they are very vulnerable. It could all stop in an instant with no sure guarantee of when it will come back.
A turning point came for me recently, while visiting a small basement laundry in Manhattan. The proprietor was still using a sewing machine from 1948. She would have nothing to do with newer models. After that, I started to take notice of the machinery of other merchants in my area. Many sewing machines are 75 years old and still working well. My cobbler uses equipment that is more than a century old. This is not uncommon.
They can all still do business with a generator and a good supply of fuel. They are prepared. This is also why people are holding on to their older gas-powered cars without all the snazzy stuff. They are more trustworthy, and you can fix what breaks. It’s better to maintain the old thing in good repair than move to the new thing that is not going to last long.
These days, few things are built for the long term. We buy smartphones and computers with full anticipation that we will buy new ones in a few years. Repairs are ever less possible. Home appliances are the same: kaput in five to 10 years. And so many are dependent on digital applications to work. The operations of locks on homes, cars, ignitions, lights, and so much more are wholly dependent on a web of hooks that require that everything is in perfect working order.
What if it’s all a house of cards?
Imagine a time when it all goes down, not for an hour or a day, but for weeks. Or months. This is precisely what people experienced in the areas most affected by Hurricane Helene. As is well known, the Federal Emergency Management Agency underperformed, but more importantly, it attempted to stop private efforts in multiple documented instances. Elon Musk had to take to social media to beg the government to let him offer free internet to people because all other options had died.
The money died. Credit cards stopped working. ATMs were dead. All communications came to a halt. The only way to transact was through cash, silver, gold, or bartering. Electric cars could not be charged. The locks on doors seized up. You could not access your bank. The internet was gone in a flash. In short, the whole of the 21st century vanished in an instant.
The only path out of this mess was with old technology. Gasoline. Generators. Matches and candles. Internal combustion. Radios with hand cranks. Cash. Books on physical paper. Paper maps. Thermometers. Blankets. Firewood. In the end, survival depended on analog things and analog skills. Though we’ve tried to reinvent the world so that it is not dependent on “fossil fuels,” know-how, and elbow grease, it just keeps reverting.
Remember during the COVID-19 crisis when everyone became suddenly obsessed with “touchless” everything? None of it made any sense because the virus did not spread on surfaces, and we discovered that pretty early on. But “touchless” technology went ahead anyway, and when restaurants reopened, people had to scan a code to access a list of things to order.
Customers hated it, and now many places have gone back to physical menus. We go to restaurants to get away from the digital world, not find ourselves newly immersed in it.
There is something deeply wrong with the attitude that touching things is icky and beneath us. It suggests an unwillingness to use the hands God gave us to better the world. On a theological level, it suggests disgust with the incarnation: Why would God ever become man if God wanted to be “touchless”? It suggests even a cult-like disgust with the physical world itself.
Fortunately, the word “touchless” seems to have lost its cachet. Even so, the word itself reveals a dangerously millenarian eschatology, the belief that history is somehow headed toward a full escape from the physical world and all its limits, including the need for work and the inevitability of mortality. It’s pure delusion. Disasters prove that.
Government has been running table-top exercises for decades with the idea of preparing for large-scale grid outages in the event of a huge weather event or a cyberattack. I can predict with 100 percent certainty that whatever plans they have in place, none will work. As our experience with Helene suggests, in the event of an emergency, the government may not be your friend but rather an obstacle, even a dangerous one.
For him, Helene prompted a fundamental rethinking of everything.
“Sitting at home during most of the power outage, time seemed to slow down. It seemed like every few minutes I had an impulse to turn on the TV to see how storm cleanup was proceeding, but—oops—no TV,” he writes. “Or I wanted to go online and see which teams had won sports contests, what was going on in the world, or even something as trivial as checking my current bank balance with the addition of the month-end interest payment. Oops—no internet.
“My thoughts turned to my dear Amish friends and neighbors when I lived in Pennsylvania. Our quiet candle-lit evenings at home during the outage now mirrored their evenings. Without the myriad distractions that electronic devices offer, there is more time for quiet reading or direct human interaction. In a society that has been becoming increasingly atomized, more personal connection seems appealing. Hmmm ... maybe now, with the power back on, I should choose one evening a week to forsake the electronic world.”
The scenarios above are about natural disasters. But we are actually more likely to encounter a crisis due to inflation than a natural emergency. It could just become too expensive to charge the cars or keep the lights on. Already I have friends whose utility bills are higher than their mortgages from 10 years ago. Somehow, people don’t think about this when they buy maximum square footage. Do you have an additional $15,000 to heat and cool it?
Most houses today, and certainly most office complexes, are designed to require electric-powered indoor air cooling and heating. We don’t use gas furnaces or rely on cross breezes anymore. Fireplaces are nothing but nostalgic vanities.
When all this building was going on for many decades, hardly anyone considered the contingencies. We built as if there were no eventualities for which to prepare.
There is another factor: forced government rationing of power. Dependency on the grid, electric cars connected to the internet, and app-controlled things are all very easily controlled by a third party. You may counter that these companies are all private and surely will ignore government edicts. We know now that this is not the case. Private companies become arms of the state under the right conditions. They will gladly comply to keep the paychecks rolling in and out.
The people who dealt with the worst of Hurricane Helene came face-to-face with the state of nature without all the comforts we’ve learned to take for granted. For my own part, it has caused me to rethink some matters. Keeping a stash of cash around is a good idea. Some bags of silver dimes are also essential. Having plenty of blankets is advisable.
The most important way to prepare is to have a strong network of friends. In the end, human bonds will prove more enduring than the power grid.
