Up The Proverbial Creek...

I wrote the other day about The Great Bishop's Castle Power Outage - actually it lasted little more than an hour, but brought the town to pretty much a standstill - which made me think: how much survival resilience do we actually have, here in the second quarter of the twenty-first century? Answer, practically none. As soon as the power goes down, pretty much every aspect of our lives goes down with it. Which is actually kind of worrying. We were subjected to a freak power outage in the mid-nineties, when we lived in Brynbella, down on the A5, on the outskirts of Bethesda, at Christmas. An ice-storm - a very rare phenomenon in the UK - had taken down every wooden power pole across the tops from Aber. We were amongst a very small number of properties that were still fed with electricity from this very old circuit across the mountain. Suffice to say, we were without power from Christmas Eve, through Christmas Day and beyond: we gave up and drove to the Midlands to stay with parents on Boxing Day, as the novelty of candle-light had by then worn very thin.

If I've mentioned this before, I apologise, but my point is, that at that point in time, we had at least some backup supplies of bottled gas, wood and coal with which to heat the house and cook ourselves some food; an oil lamp and candles supplied light, and we had cash to buy stuff from the shops and petrol stations - who could still trade in cash and without electricity - as needed. In short, there was strength in depth: in other words we had redundant systems to back things up for the duration. What do we have now? A blind reliance on a pretty much monolithic system which centres on the internet. If the power goes, the shit can't even hit the fan, because the fan no longer works.

The weirdest and most ironic thing about this is that the internet was designed and built as a nuclear war survivable military and academic data network that could continue to function even if multiple parts of the network were taken out by nuke strikes. The stupidest thing we've done to date as a species is to lard this whole edifice with multiple layers of secondary networks that don't - can't - draw on the fundamental stability of the core network. In our haste and greed we have sold ourselves the most monumental pup of a world system: the largest and most friable house of cards yet invented. The need for backup systems is now at its most acute than at any time in human history...