An article that appeared in the December 4, 2024, edition of The New York Times was titled as follows in the hard copy version: "When Cables Break Under the Sea, A Wireless World's Vulnerability Is Exposed."
The article is lengthy; it begins on Page One, and then takes up two full pages in the interior of the paper. If you can dodge or otherwise defeat the paywall that I suspect will make it difficult or impossible for non-subscribers to read the article, I certainly recommend that you do read it, in its entirety. To summarize, though, our "online world" depends on cables laid on "a seabed so deep that no human has ever set foot on it." When those cables fail, for whatever reason ("when" they fail; not "if"), the world no longer works as we expect it to.
This situation, with respect to the "communications" that make our world function, is very much like the situation that faces us with respect to electrical power, also subject to massive and long-lived failures - failures to which we are ever more subject, in our time of Global Warming. I have already done a blog posting about that, back on the very day that The Times' article on the undersea cables was published. I titled that blog posting, "Houston We [All] Have A Problem."
Building our civilization on technologies that can fail, with massive impacts way beyond the "local," has been a choice. And maybe not a very smart or thoughtful choice.
In many, many ways, we have designed our civilization to be vulnerable and precarious, all because we have made various technologies so essential to our ongoing life that when our technology fails (and "when" and not "if" it fails is probably the right way to express it), the scale of the damage and disaster is almost beyond repair.
2025 looks like a year in which fundamental changes are going to be ever more necessary - in lots of areas. Finding ways to protect ourselves when the technologies upon which we are ever more dependent fail is one of those areas we don't think abou very much.
Perhaps we should! Perhaps we should start thinking about that!
How about Now? I am suggesting that "now" would be a good time to start thinking about how to redesign the way we have organized our civilization. Now. Not after disaster has occurred.
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