I watched a film ‘Leave the World Behind’ on Netflix last night which has had mixed reviews. It’s an apocalyptic post global cyber-attack tale told in a U.S. domestic setting. I thought it was relatively convincing, if a little preachy in some respects (e.g. addressing whether a black family really could enjoy a luxurious lifestyle in America). The film apparently was made by a company started by Barack Obama, and he it seems gave a shed load of advice about what would be realistic if a major cyber attack took place. Some of what was portrayed when our cyber world fails seemed realistic—no internet, no phones, no TV, planes dropping out of the sky (really?), ships running amok—in other words, and as we’re repeatedly told these days, our lives now depend on cyberspace fully functioning. But here we’re very much in E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops territory. What happens when the back-up system is itself grounded in cyberspace? When the repair person is not a person but another program also subject to either the threat of the hacker or even the much vaunted super solar flare? Anyway, I quite enjoyed the film, especially the scene where Tesla cars blocked a highway in a massive pile-up as they all raced uncontrollably into each other. It seems Elon Musk has responded by saying that his cars can at least all run on solar power. What a wit. Thankfully for the characters (and this has to be a bit of a criticism) the mains electricity to the house they were in seemed to continue long after everything else had packed up. I have to say that I doubt mains power would survive very long, we have seen already major power blackouts in the States thanks to an infrastructure developed without suitable resilience built in.
The basic premise of the film was that a savvy attacker would seek to bring down a government by creating such circumstances of civil collapse that a coup d’etat would become inevitable. In a crisis created by such attackers, one would have to assume that they were capable of e.g communicating with each other and marshalling their forces with or without electronic means. Is this what ex-President Obama thinks is possible? Has the Pentagon war gamed the possibility? Sadly, I think we can be fairly sure that failsafe backup systems these days will mostly rely on the same technologies which are all equally vulnerable. So it was reassuring today to hear on the BBC Today programme an interview with a UK Trident sub commander telling us that one of the key indicators of the destruction of the UK would be the silencing of Radio 4. But would the sub commander learn about this on the Medium Wave or digital? I can see now that I’m beginning to veer off into uninformed, confused speculation. And I haven’t even broached the subject of the mysterious radio signal that excites the interest of the last surviving post-atomic war U.S. sub in On The Beach. Finally on that thought, at least a cyber war won’t unleash a deadly worldwide radiation cloud. Will it?
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November 2024
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