Conspiracy Theory

I didn’t make the connection. I read about United being grounded before I left for work and saw the blurb about the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) going silent after I arrived. It popped up as an email email alert with a glaring absence of why it was offline. The lack of explanation for the closing of the NYSE (a deeply uncommon event) led me to actually click on the link. The Washington post included a quote from someone assuring America that the failure was not a hack, just a technical glitch. 

Move along nothing to see here. And if they hadn’t assured me there was no hack I probably wouldn’t have thought this might be a hack.

But someone said it so my imagination started jogging. Part of it was just an exercise in fun, a “what if?” game played out against real circumstances. After all, it isn’t unthinkable, I received my obligatory letter from Uncle Sam in the mail assuring me that my information had most likely been stolen in the government breach. It isn’t like a hack is an unthinkable thing.

My day was full though, and so my musings about a hack by anyone receded and United and the NYSE were back up and running (along with the Wall Street Journal and apparently Seattle’s 911 system), certain that they were unrelated technical difficulties. Just isolated unrelated incidents.

And they probably are. Isolated. Unrelated. 

Anonymous’s ominous message the night before it all went down is a coincidence (their words not mine). I hope we heed – fantastical conspiracy theory warnings though they might be. Something or someone will come for us...eventually. That is the way of war and domination, that is the way we play politics as a country. And unlike someone flying planes into buildings, what is coming for us now is something we can imagine- it won’t catch us wondering who thought up such a plan and marveling at the execution. Instead, we will have a list of breaches and breakdowns of the past.

We’ve been warned.

Yet Americans still lay about with our necks and belies exposed. The more we rely on technology the less we seem to protect the very parts of it that we rely on. Now, like some Star Trek (TNG) episode gone nightmarishly wrong, we have thrust all of our information, personal and state, into places we don’t fully understand with the silly assumption that the rest of the world doesn’t understand it either. In ignorance we are safe.

But we aren’t. And right now we have no Jean-Luc Picard to save us.

I’m very much aware that today’s technical difficulties were just that, technical difficulties. But those difficulties provide us with an opportunity to see how dependent we are on our constantly evolving technology. We could use it as a dry-run before the water is real and a rising tide alerts us to the holes in our boat. But we have to be willing to see.

The US Office of Personnel Management (twice) and the IRS, Target, Anthem, Chase (the list goes on)...they seem to come more frequently these days- numbing us into the sense that it is all inevitable. And maybe it is…

The thing about convenience (and our online lifestyles are nothing if not convenient) is it is easy to get accustomed to it and take it for granted. Easy to forget how to function without it. And then its absence feels less like an inconvenience and more like a crisis. 

Back some years ago when I was living in Auckland (New Zealand) there was an electrical failure of some kind, power went out all over the city, for hours. Certain kind of locks didn’t work, elevators in ridiculously tall buildings were useless, stoplights went dark, food went un-refrigerated. 

It was as if the population of Auckland was suddenly filled with children bumbling through the world. We were all wandering around confused about what we should be doing and how it should get done. Even my boyfriend at the time- from a place where electricity routinely goes off as a matter of expectation, and me-accustomed to living in places with no electricity at all, felt disoriented. We joked about how easily we forgot ourselves and all of the ways we know how to function without electricity. Just like that, placed in the context of flipping a switch and trusting that the current would be flowing, we’d become dependent.

Like everyone else (although probably for a shorter period of time) we looked at the dead elevators forgetting the stairs (all 11 narrow flights) existed. We marveled at our useless electric stoves and wondered how we’d cook. We commented on our lack of batteries and flashlights and candles. We were wholly unprepared. 

Right now, most Americans are unprepared. 

We have forsaken house phones for cellular ones, limiting the structural damage necessary for maximum impact. We are tethered to convenience –little boxes of information that light and guide us through the world. I tried to buy a key map last year. Tired of looking at turn-by-turn directions without a context of where I was turning to and from. The people in the stores and gas stations where I searched, looked perplexed and confused. Someone even asked, “Don’t you have a smart phone?” 

Of course I do. But a Gen Xer, not a Millennial, I came of age in a world where everything wasn’t uploaded into the cloud. I straddle the change in times and remember the pre and post digital age. I am close enough to the before and after (technology) to not be too nostalgic or overly and unfairly skeptical. I recognize our technological advances as useful tools. I also recognize them as convenient and not essential.

So I feel the need to throw up at least a whisper of caution. Not because I think the robots are going to revolt circa I, Robot or Battlestar Galactica (even with this recent news story), but because I’m a pragmatist. 

Understanding the strengths and the vulnerabilities of our technological lifestyle doesn’t require a rejection of it. It isn’t necessary to be a Luddite and forsake all of the comforts that technology provides. But on both a micro and a macro level, Americans need to be mindful that the world is filled with uncertainties. And while we shouldn’t live in fear- constantly raising terror alerts until we are numb to the changing color and the threat it implies- we should think about safety.

Safety now looks a little different than it used to. Safety now is hiring the best hackers to protect the secrets we no longer lock away in highly secured buildings, but instead, thrust into strings of 0s and 1s somewhere out in cyberspace. Safety is improving our technological infrastructure as ardently as we should be improving our more tangible infrastructure. Safety now is enjoying the ease of technological living but understanding how to survive without it…if only until the elevators in our really tall buildings start running again.