Fragile Connections
I live in a little city in central Arizona. Going across town on my way home, I heard on the radio that the internet was dead in my area. I've been through outages before and although they're annoying, they usually only last a few minutes. But this time...
I get home and hear the problem was from a construction accident way down near Phoenix, where someone or something severed a fiber-optic cable which feeds points north, like me. I don't know much about how they work but do know those cables handle all the internet traffic from here to there, ultimately everywhere.
One would think that these things are repairable and routines already exist to repair a failed segment. Maybe they are, but the net has now been dead over two hours, calling 911 and who-knows-what doesn't work.
So our little city is starting to find out how dependent it has become on the internet. Right now, it's just an annoyance, but what if this goes on throughout the day, the week or the month? Innumerable businesses and services have come to rely on the net to stay afloat and, one by one, will eventually fail without it.
As I write this (because I have nothing better to do right now), electricity and landline phones still work, so if we can figure how we got along with just them, only ten, twenty years ago, we'll get by. But it's no stretch to say we'll never learn how to embrace regression. And if the net stays down, it's probably just a matter of time until those quaint technologies go down too. Then we'll be back in the old west, where there are no cars, no lights at night and horses will be very expensive.
And what’s more, this certainly seems like a slam dunk play for terrorists. If they're stupid enough that this has never occurred to them, it will soon enough. All they have to is find a working fiber-optic cable and cut it. I know that's true because some dingleberry just did that by accident.
But now, six hours later, I’m told it was on purpose, as in an act of vandalism!
And then they fixed it, just like that. Everything works just fine now, same as it ever was. So we can go on with our blind devotion to an essential technology we know nothing about, other than how to unlike your in-laws... fragile connections indeed.
I live in a little city in central Arizona. Going across town on my way home, I heard on the radio that the internet was dead in my area. I've been through outages before and although they're annoying, they usually only last a few minutes. But this time...
I get home and hear the problem was from a construction accident way down near Phoenix, where someone or something severed a fiber-optic cable which feeds points north, like me. I don't know much about how they work but do know those cables handle all the internet traffic from here to there, ultimately everywhere.
One would think that these things are repairable and routines already exist to repair a failed segment. Maybe they are, but the net has now been dead over two hours, calling 911 and who-knows-what doesn't work.
So our little city is starting to find out how dependent it has become on the internet. Right now, it's just an annoyance, but what if this goes on throughout the day, the week or the month? Innumerable businesses and services have come to rely on the net to stay afloat and, one by one, will eventually fail without it.
As I write this (because I have nothing better to do right now), electricity and landline phones still work, so if we can figure how we got along with just them, only ten, twenty years ago, we'll get by. But it's no stretch to say we'll never learn how to embrace regression. And if the net stays down, it's probably just a matter of time until those quaint technologies go down too. Then we'll be back in the old west, where there are no cars, no lights at night and horses will be very expensive.
And what’s more, this certainly seems like a slam dunk play for terrorists. If they're stupid enough that this has never occurred to them, it will soon enough. All they have to is find a working fiber-optic cable and cut it. I know that's true because some dingleberry just did that by accident.
But now, six hours later, I’m told it was on purpose, as in an act of vandalism!
And then they fixed it, just like that. Everything works just fine now, same as it ever was. So we can go on with our blind devotion to an essential technology we know nothing about, other than how to unlike your in-laws... fragile connections indeed.
