What Should We Be Worried About?

all. Perhaps an aging Putin will seek historical immortality and restore Russian greatness by swallowing a former Soviet republic or two.

Breakers (vandals, griefers) have more leverage than Makers (builders, creators), even though the Makers far outnumber the Breakers

We should study the dynamics of the beginning of unintended wars of the past—in particular, World War I. There are plenty of similarities between our time and the first few years of the last century.

Perhaps an aging Putin will seek historical immortality and restore Russian greatness by swallowing a former Soviet republic or two.

As the late James Lee Byars, my friend and sometime collaborator, used to say: “I can answer the question, but am I bright enough to ask it?”

On the morning of August 31, 1859, the sun ejected a giant burst of charged particles. They hit Earth eighteen hours later, creating auroras so bright that at 1:00 A.M. birds sang and people thought morning had dawned. Currents induced in telegraph wires prevented transmission, and sparks from the wires set papers aflame. According to data from ice cores, solar ejections this intense occur about every 500 years.

Most computers—from your car’s engine controller to your desktop—can be rebooted into safe mode to get you home. But no safe mode for the Internet? We should be worried about that.

We need a low-bandwidth, high-latency store-and-forward message system that can run in emergency mode on an ad-hoc network assembled from mobile phones and laptop computers even if the main networks fail. We should keep this system on standby and periodically exercise it, along with a network of volunteers trained in network first aid the way we train lifeguards and babysitters in CPR.

Sooner or later—by intent or by accident—we will face a catastrophic breakdown of the Internet. Yet we have no Plan B in place to reboot a rudimentary, low-bandwidth emergency communication network if the high-bandwidth system we’ve come to depend on fails.

This is wonderful, mostly. Religious institutions that could always rely in the past on the relative ignorance of their flock must now revise their proselytizing and indoctrinating policies or risk extinction. Dictators face the dire choice between maximal suppression—turning their nations into prisons—or tolerating an informed and well-connected opposition. Knowledge really is power, as people are coming to realize all over the world.