Resilience

Anyone who has read these pages for any length of time will know that whilst I was a very early adopter of digital technologies, I also cleave to the analogue world that we seem to be leaving behind us at an ever increasing clip. All well and good - I mentioned last night that the invention of the smartphone has pretty much democratised the possession of enormously powerful tech throughout a large part of the globe - when it's all working smoothly and seamlessly, which to be fair it achieves ninety-odd percent of the time. When it does go wrong, however, which it does, this huge basket of metaphorical eggs we carry in our pockets and rely on for just about everything in modern life, suddenly turns into an unmade omelette without pan or flame to cook it.

Reliance on digital-only living is precarious and depends on huge interconnected support structures, power supplies and networks simply to function. It is not a chain that can be broken but a huge net easily shredded given the right adverse conditions. A single large solar storm can take out the whole kit and kaboodle in seconds: the global [internet] network itself may well survive in part - it was built to withstand nuclear war, after all - but for huge swathes of the human population, the rest of their electronics would die under its effects, with instantly catastrophic effect. Most people in what used to be called the developed world would instantly be cut off from supplies of money, food and fuel. Many - particularly newer - vehicles would cease to function. There would be few means of communication: how many UK citizens have access to old-school copper-only landlines today? Most of us are solely connected to each other digitally, and with a large chunk of the network missing entirely for the duration, there would be no voice calls, texts, socials - anything - left.

If this sounds dystopian and highly unlikely, think again: events such as this have already happened at smaller scale across the globe on numerous occasions due to a wide variety of causes; natural, via malicious action or just plain bad luck and/or planning. The problem is we have been rushing into a world - for wholly commercial reasons, by and large - of our own pretty well unplanned creation: we have no Plan B. We could get very badly caught out if no provision has been made somewhere for a fallback as a safety net. And that Plan B by definition would have to be analogue in nature to guarantee a sufficient level of resilience in conditions adverse enough to cause a major digital outage in the first place.

My guess is, that there will have been left in situ - certainly here in the UK - sufficient copper cable - perhaps a spine of a hundred pairs running through every remaining main exchange on the old network, branching down to fifty, to twenty, to ten, to five pairs in turn, in order to service a national emergency network. If there hasn't been such forethought and provision then we are truly holding ourselves to ransom...