"The Internet and its algorithms Are Rapidly Changing Nearly Everything about Our World, Including Our Capacity to Recognize How Profound and Dangerous the Changes Are"

 

 “When we are online, where most data about us is being collected, every click, like, share, or thumbs-up we post is recorded and catalogued. Every article we read, advertisement we look at, video we watch, link we make, tweet we send, photo we post, and website we visit is observed and noted. Every e-mail we send, blog we read, newsfeed we check, comment we make, and emoji we choose, is digitally seen and stored.

“All of it—24/7 and without exception—gets amalgamated and assembled into our own unique, personal descriptive profile. A picture of our life, habits and interests, history, age, race, religion, health, occupation, marital status, education, address, income and financial situation, political and sexual orientation, and other information gets assembled and becomes stored and available online. The profile may contain inaccuracies, but mostly it’s uncannily accurate. And it is continually added to as we repeatedly go online.

“This data gets ‘weaponized.’ It is used against us and against our interests. It is used to make us into impulsive, impressionable, status-seeking, silly, distracted, acquisitive, consuming, web-addicted people. The data is used both to hook us into consuming as much online entertainment and content as possible and to purchase more goods and services generally. It is used to modify, change, and direct both our moods and our behavior…

“Today, capitalism has unprecedented power. The invention of the internet, and the data collection that goes along with it, allows all the many enterprises of the market to track, tally, and target us with ads, videos, articles, newsfeeds, links, and more, that flatter and seduce us… (59).

“We have created enormous dependencies on computers and their uninterrupted connections to the internet. At every level of society—from our personal lives to our businesses, to our towns to our entire society—we rely on computers and connectivity from the moment we wake up to the moment we fall asleep.

“At a personal level, we employ our smart-phones and laptops and tablets and e-readers for seemingly everything: communications, scheduling, navigation, news, music, entertainment, work, shopping, purchasing, and countless other tasks and purposes. We rely on the myriad of capacities built into these devices as well as constantly adding innumerable supplementary apps to expand the features of the devices—and enlarge our reliance on them… (60).

 

“[However], if the operation of the internet system itself is interrupted—the most serious hack of all—there is dangerous vulnerability that is closely associated with that.  That danger is the potential for the nation’s electrical grid to fail. The electrical grid sprawls across the country in a massive infrastructure of power plants, substations, transformers, equipment, and power lines. Nearly all of that infrastructure is monitored and controlled today by computers. The electrical demand on all parts of the system is monitored by computers, and the electrical power sent to users is regulated and allocated by computers.

“Electrical power today is generated from many sources—oil, natural gas, coal, wood products, wind, solar, nuclear, hydroelectric—and consequently the costs and quantities of electricity available from different power plants can vary on an hourly and daily basis… The grid the power will both originate and be sent is an integrated task that is performed today almost wholly by computers and computer-controlled instrumentation and equipment.

“These computers and the networks that they operate on are continuously connected to the internet. It is no exaggeration to say that human beings alone—without computers—could no longer maintain the balancing and rebalancing that occurs within the electrical grid. If the internet went down over wide areas of the country for a sustained period of time, say, many days or a week or more, let’s repeat that: if the internet fails, is hacked, is sabotaged, or goes down for any reason—over a wide area of the United States and for a significant period of time—effectively the entire electrical grid would fail, and no electricity (with relatively tiny, decentralized exceptions) would be sent anywhere.

“And, of course, the reverse is true too. In a kind of circular dependency and vulnerability, if the electrical grid were for any reason to be the first element of our infrastructure to fail, then the internet would fail for lack of electrical power. So too would every computer, laptop, phone, network, and Internet-of-Things device that requires either or both electrical power and a connection to the web…

“Without an operational internet, grocery stores would not get restocked, gas stations would not be refueled, banks would cease to permit withdrawals or other operations, credit cards would not work, smart phones would be useless, telecommunications would go dead, trucking and airline flights would halt, wastewater would not get treated, and the water supply itself would halt or become unreliable.

“Without the web, factories would cease production, fuel would not get refined, the entire financial system would become inert, police and fire operations would dwindle, and governments would become ineffective.

“Without the web, buildings would have neither heat nor air-conditioning, automobile traffic and mass transit would halt, hospitals and medical care would degrade, schools would shut down, and work itself—normal jobs—would cease…

“How would citizens—especially in cities—respond? If every single system of communication, food and water supply, mobility, medical care, employment, and finance broke down, how would we cope? Without heating or cooling, without any emergency services, without any money or use for it, how would we cope? How quickly would chaos, illness, crime, and deaths be widespread?

“We can barely imagine these things. They are unbearably unthinkable. But they all would occur, and occur relatively quickly, in the absence of computers and the internet, and the resulting absence of electrical power… (66-68).

 

Watson, Brian T. Headed into the Abyss: The Story of Our Time and the Future We’ll Face. Swampscott, Massachusetts: Anvil Press, 2019.