The end isn’t nigh, but buy candles just in case
Before you laugh at warnings about ‘network collapse’, ask yourself: could you survive without power and the internet?
Perhaps the worst review I ever gave to a book was my verdict on Oliver Letwin’s Apocalypse How?: Technology and the Threat of Disaster at the start of 2020. I still feel bad about this but it wasn’t my fault. It was his fault, because it’s bad.
Billed as a warning about the danger of network collapse – the internet going down, and so on – about half of it took the form of a novel, set in 2037. Oh yes. Obviously there are already quite a few novels about apocalypses of various sorts, but he didn’t seem to have read any of them. Most have as their central character an approachable everyman; his is a Bank of England official who spends most of the book driving along the A30 to his second home in Yeovil. Other characters have frankly bizarre backstories to explain their actions, such as the time they fell down a well. God, I had fun.
Away from fiction, quite a lot of the rest of the book is a convoluted explanation of risk based on a long analogy about your friend buying you ice cream in 300 years’ time. Also, there are pyramids. I won’t go on. So savage was my verdict, indeed, that I didn’t just get invited on to Today (Tuesday) on BBC Radio 4 the next day to discuss it with Letwin himself, but I also said “no” because I thought it would be too cruel. And then, about a week later, Covid kicked off. And I thought, “oh”.
Needless to say, Covid was not a crisis based on the internet going down. There were early moments, though, when everything really did seem to be breaking. PPE wasn’t coming in, harvests looked set to rot in fields. Schools closed and public services generally seemed to wither. For a week or so – and you may sneer at this now, but only if you’ve forgotten – proper social breakdown, the full Stephen King novel, seemed horribly possible. And all the things in Letwin’s book that I’d chortled about no longer seemed very funny.
I’ve been thinking about this lately, anyway, for two reasons. The first is that I just saw Leave the World Behind, the excellent film of Rumaan Alam’s novel, starring Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali and others. That apocalypse isn’t really about network collapse either – it’s weirder than that; I won’t spoil it – but it certainly plays a part. It works well because the characters are all in the middle of nowhere, so any actual disaster is happening far, far away.
At first, even the power stays on. Yet they can’t google, can’t call anyone, can’t watch TV, can’t even distract their kids with an iPad. They’re helpless, with no way of knowing what is going on. And that’s before we even get to what happens to the Teslas.
The other reason is that barely three weeks ago, the Tories’ other major Oliver (Dowden, deputy PM) raised the alarm about exactly the same thing. Launching something called the UK’s “resilience framework”, he suggested that every home should, at the very least, have candles, a first aid kit and a battery-powered analog radio. “The world has changed unrecognisably,” he said, “and our society is highly reliant on our digital infrastructure.” The threat could be cyberattack. It could just be stuff breaking. Neither is an unrealistic fear. Somehow, though, we do seem to struggle to take it seriously.
I’m a fairly handy guy. Don’t scoff. When our current cleaner took over from her friend, our last cleaner, the first thing she said to me was, “I hear you can fix things.” Can you imagine? So proud. It’s true, though. I can do your basic drilling and screwing but I can also fix basic plumbing, change a tap, wire a light fitting, replace a phone screen or swap out a blown motor in a vacuum cleaner.
Well done me. Although what I actually mean by saying I can do all these things is that I can follow instructions, which are normally online. But if I couldn’t do that? I suppose I’d have to phone somebody. And if I couldn’t do that, either? Helpless. Like a chimpanzee at a piano.
We underestimate our own reliance on the internet, enormously. When asylum seekers step off boats with smartphones, or crowds in Gaza seem to be waving them despite power outages, I have seen and shared a faint sense of surprise at these supposed trappings of luxury among people otherwise so unfortunate. But they’re not luxuries any more, are they? They’re your wallet, your diary, your bank, your pen. Forget no longer carrying cash, half the time these days I don’t even carry cards.
Diehard cash purists still exist, I know, but they’re kidding themselves. They’re still reliant on the same networks to get cash in the first place and to spend it, and indeed to have anything to spend it on. There is no escape.
Some people, I know, are apt to get rantingly paranoid about all of this, believing tech reliance to be an authoritarian plot by a combination of Amazon, the World Bank and maybe aliens, who are soon to send their stormtroopers to our doors. Although they’ve clearly slipped up by popularising the phone app doorbell in that case, because they could be out there for hours and we’d never know.
Either way, it’s not the potential for authoritarianism that worries me, so much as the potential for chaos. What can we do about it? Maybe not much, but notice. Notice where your music now comes from. How you now need to charge up your book, your newspaper, even your cigarette. Think about what you’d do if all this stopped, even if just for a week. It is not ridiculous to worry about this stuff. It may be ridiculous not to. Buy some candles, dig out that radio. And if you see Oliver Letwin, tell him I’m sorry. If only a bit.
The Times
