The answer is that they are not just fiction. They could indeed happen in any society in the developed world. In fact, there is every reason to expect that, if we don’t take appropriate action, they, or something very much like them, will happen at some point in the not too distant future. One just has to look at the reports of the Russian cyber-attacks on Ukraine’s power grid in 2015 and 2016 to see that we are dealing with a coming reality rather than science fiction.

The story told in this book is a modern-day parable: a story with a meaning, told with the purpose of conveying that meaning. But, like all parables, it is just one of many different stories that could have made the same point. And, as with all parables, to grasp the point, one must look through the medium to find the message.

I have chosen to illustrate the fragility of converging networks, and the dangers for society of excessive dependence on such networks, through picturing what might occur if a particular event were to have a particular set of effects on the electricity grid and on certain satellites. But this is not to say that electricity grids and satellite systems are the only networks that could fail, or that an event of the sort pictured in the story is the only kind of thing that could cause such fragile networks to break down. By no means. There are many converging, fragile networks; and there are many kinds of things that could cause them to break down. The time has come to recognize that more and more parts of our lives – of society itself – depend on fewer and fewer, more integrated networks. More of our communications infrastructure, our financial and industrial systems, our transport and energy systems – in short, everything we have learned to use in every aspect of our normal lives – can now function only through a highly developed set of interconnected and interdependent networks. The electricity grid, the Internet, satellite positioning systems and mobile telecommunications networks have become the unseen net that supports the society and economy of most developed countries. And each of these networks, in varying ways, depends on the others. So we are close to having, in effect, one network of networks on which more or less everything else – government, the public services, business and family life – relies.

A good way of understanding what is going on at present – and how many of the normal features of life either already hang or will shortly be hanging on this single, fragile thread – is to think back just over forty years, to 1976. That may seem a long time ago, but it is within the lifespan of about half the people alive today.

In 1977, the launch of commercial mobile phones was still six years in the future; the Internet was in its infancy – the father of the Internet, Vint Cerf, had not yet set up the coordinating bodies that would eventually give rise to the world wide web. Most electricity supply industries across the developed world had plenty of highly flexible, fossil-fuel-generating stations which had ‘black-start capability’: in other words, if there was a grid failure, they could start up on their own without having to feed into the grid. There were no electric or autonomous vehicles – just drivers driving machines with internal combustion engines fuelled by petrol or diesel. There were no emails or texts or Facebook or Twitter or any other ‘social media’ – communication was by post, telephone or telegram: the postal system collected and delivered letters several times each day; the plain old telephone service had its own power supplies, and had no connection with the emerging Internet; the telegraph system was independently powered and totally separate from the telephone system. Almost all financial transactions occurred either in cash dispensed by bank clerks or via cheques – interbank transfers were by telex, a system separate from post, telephone and telegraph networks. People in every service industry, including key public services, were used to receiving instructions face-to-face in offices and stations or via walkie-talkies that were powered by batteries bought in shops. In short, most developed countries had lots of separate, stand-alone systems and networks that had nothing much to do with one another. If one of them went down, the rest were likely to be entirely unaffected.

Fast-forward forty years, and most of this has changed beyond recognition. Mobile communication is now the centrepiece of life. Via the smartphone, the tablet and wi-fi, mobile networks are now completely integrated with the Internet, on which we depend not only for innumerable forms of communication but also for almost every form of information. The electricity grid’s communications system can no longer be entirely isolated from the Internet. With electricity supply coming increasingly from low-carbon generators, most electricity supply industries no longer have large numbers of generating plants that can provide black-start capability in the event of a black-out caused by grid failure. Electric vehicles are multiplying, and autonomous, driverless vehicles guided partly by mobile communications through the Internet are on the way. The postal system no longer carries urgent messages on a timely basis, and relies on the Internet for its operation. The plain old telephone service has disappeared, and fixed-line communication is now all based on Internet Protocols (IP); the telegraph system has gone, as has telex. Almost all financial transactions occur electronically via IP-based systems. People in every service industry, including key public services, are no longer used to receiving instructions face-to-face in offices and stations – many of them do not have permanent offices, and they communicate for all purposes, including during emergencies, via electronic, IP-based systems. Even health services increasingly depend on the exchange of data via IP-based systems: the pace-makers in people’s hearts report back continuously via mobile communication and cloud computing to the hospitals that installed them. In short, we no longer have lots of separate, independent stand-alone networks. If the electricity grid and the Internet are impaired, just about every commercial transaction and just about every activity in society is affected.

Fast-forward another twenty years to the late 2030s, and it is pretty clear that the remaining independent (and hence more resilient) aspects of our economy and society are likely to have been drawn into the same cat’s cradle of interlocking systems. Electric and autonomous vehicles – wholly dependent on the electricity grid, the mobile communications system and the Internet – will be becoming the norm. Tele-health and tele-care will be vastly more prevalent: frail, elderly people will be continuously monitored by smart technologies, as will people with many chronic conditions. This is rapidly becoming a preoccupation for health administrators in every advanced economy; as NHS England recently put it, ‘one of the challenges is ensuring that the way we commission, contract and pay for care keeps up with the opportunities digital innovation offers – ensuring that new technology is safely integrated into health and care pathways’. Meanwhile, the use of credit cards (and hence of the Internet) for shopping has hugely increased: for example, more than 20% of total retail sales in the UK are already online (almost ten times the proportion that was online in 2006). There is every reason to suppose that, throughout the world, the proportion of financial and commercial transactions using the Internet, either for face-to-face credit-based transactions or for online transactions, will continue to increase significantly in what will no doubt be finally a cashless society. Manufacturing, energy and service industries, already heavily IP-based, will virtually all depend on the web. The operation of government, public services and civil society organizations will have ‘caught up’ with the private sector and become net-based – and hence net-dependent.

In short, if the electricity grid and the Internet go down in the late 2030s, and if we have not taken very particular precautions, it is likely that life as we know it will close down too, for as long as it takes to restore normal service. The immediate reaction of most sensible people to apocalyptic warnings of this kind is either to dismiss them as ‘hyped-up nonsense’ or to assume that someone, somewhere, is already ‘dealing with the problem’.

But, in this particular case, there are good reasons not to regard the possibility of life as we know it shutting down as ‘hyped-up nonsense’ – because a sophisticated modern society is dependent on energy, transport and communication-at-a-distance to a degree that would have astonished our ancestors.

Those living in relatively unsophisticated societies of the past were far less reliant than we are today on regional, national and global interconnectivity. The inhabitants of an early-medieval manor in feudal Europe, for example, were largely self-sustaining. They grew their own crops, husbanded their own animals, drew their own water, and made their own food; they constructed (in the main) their own tools and dwellings; and they typically provided themselves with such means of transport as they possessed out of their own resources. From time to time, they might make the journey to market in a nearby town – through forests or meadows or along ‘droves’ or paths which they or their near neighbours maintained. But if this means of trading agricultural produce for goods from further afield was denied to them for a period of time for one reason or another, they could sustain the delay without undue disruption to the normal rhythms of their lives.

Of course, such unsophisticated societies were much less resilient than ours to events of certain kinds. They suffered from, and were often powerless to deal with, fires, floods, poor harvests, armed incursions and a multitude of ailments and diseases – including, at the extreme, the Black Death, which tore through much of Western Europe with devastating effects. The penalty imposed by the self-sustaining and simple life of small feudal communities was the inability (or near-inability) to mobilize resources on a sufficient scale and at sufficient speed to combat or respond effectively to such natural and artificial disasters. These relatively widely dispersed communities were reliant on themselves not only in the good times but also at times when they desperately needed, but could not generally obtain, help from outside.

The ability of our state and our society to respond effectively and rapidly to major events of the sort that would have overwhelmed our ancestors crucially depends on the functioning of our energy, transport and communications networks. It is these networks – national, supra-national and global – that enable us today (and even more so in the near future) to mobilize vast resources and to focus them on specific localities that need help at a given moment. The rub is that these wide-area, real-time, high-tech systems are themselves (because of their sophistication and the wide access that they offer) vulnerable to attack from a large array of potential onslaughts, both natural and man-made.

Although modern societies are much better protected than their predecessors against certain kinds of danger, they are much less protected than their simpler predecessors against other kinds of danger. On a scale that we are only beginning to understand, our society is built on assumptions that may be shown to be false by events that trigger global effects. In the face of occurrences that either wouldn’t have affected our ancestors or against which they had a natural resilience, we, in our sophistication, have lost resilience. This is exactly what happened to the economies of the West during the financial crash of 2008: the inter-continental banking system, which normally increases our resilience by providing security for each individual bank, turned into a massive liability when the failure of Lehman triggered wide-scale effects across the financial systems of Europe and North America.

In summary, economies of scale provide huge insurance against some forms of risk, but also dramatically magnify others. As a result, warnings that life as we know it could be fundamentally disrupted under certain circumstances, and that the risk of this occurring is increasing as we become more technologically sophisticated, are far from being hyperbole. In fact, such warnings are no more than sober-minded observations about the circumstances we face in the not too distant future.

Nor should we assume that all is well because someone, somewhere, is ‘dealing with the problem’. Of course, it is true that there are very clever and very well-informed people in positions of influence and power who do spend time worrying about these issues. And there is a widespread acceptance among those who work in the relevant fields that there are serious issues to consider. But there are also structural reasons why such issues and risks don’t rise to the top of the political agenda until and unless a disaster materializes.

First, there is the doctrine of ‘the more pressing question’. The business of politics, whether in a liberal democracy or a one-party state or a kingdom, is, and always has been, hugely exerting for those involved in it. Wherever you look in the world, government ministers and senior officials are busy, busy, busy. They have so many things to attend to, so many people to see, so many interests to placate, so many issues to address. They rise early and go to bed late. Therefore, they are surrounded by support systems and private offices designed to make their task more tractable by eliminating, so far as possible, all of the things that aren’t a priority at any given time: to make maximum space for careful consideration of those things which are genuine priorities at the time in question. The result is that long-term dangers – things that almost certainly won’t happen today or tomorrow – inevitably come later in the queue than the most immediate concerns. And by the time that tomorrow has come and gone, there will be some other immediate challenge which takes its place at the head of the queue. So, in any country, it is incredibly difficult to raise sustained interest in the highest reaches of government about risks that are far off.

Second, there is the doctrine of ‘the reality of certainty’ – in other words, the contrast between the things you can be sure will happen and the things that only might happen. If people at the centre of governments are busy, if resources (both intellectual and financial) are limited, if pressure for immediate results is great, then the natural response is to focus on problems that are ‘real’ rather than ‘hypothetical’: problems that you can see right before your very eyes rather than problems you might have to speculate about. Inevitably, the proposition that, at some unknown date, we might be exposed to some unknown form of attack or natural event that will have some (albeit possibly widespread) effect on our lives sounds very much like speculation rather than a fact. The natural response of the system is to leave such speculation to people in some basement or back-room and to concentrate the time and effort of senior officials (and the money that only they can mobilize) on more immediate, more certain challenges.

Third, there is the doctrine of ‘the invisible benefit’. The sad truth is that, if you are a government that succeeds in preventing a disaster from occurring, the wider population will probably be unaware that it might have occurred. In many ways, this is the most powerful obstacle to serious action in the field of resilience planning. People engaged in politics the world over are hugely reluctant to spend much of their time doing things for which they will never be thanked. If the things you do or argue for have only a negative effect of preventing something happening which would have adversely affected people, then you can be quite sure you will never be thanked. No one will see disasters that don’t happen and no one will know that you have done anything to stop them from happening. Invisible benefits are at a discount in politics.

Fourth, there is the doctrine of ‘the unknown consequence’. This is a really hideous irony, which amplifies the problem of the ‘invisible benefit’. It arises from the fact that when you take action to prevent some future possible disaster from occurring, you don’t know whether the thing you have done (in order to prevent disaster) will actually work. You may well discover in due course that everyone does get to know about the ghastly event that you thought you were preventing – because you have failed to prevent it. And, at this point, you can be sure that (instead of thanking you for having tried to prevent it) the people who are affected by the event in question will immediately and very forcefully excoriate you for having done such a bad job of preventing it. Worse still, because it was you who took on the job of trying to prevent it, they will specifically blame you rather than someone else who might have prevented it (or perhaps even had primary responsibility for preventing it) but who was lazy enough or wise enough to leave the job to you. No one is ever forgiven for a good deed that goes wrong.

Finally, there is the doctrine of ‘the riper time’. This is the particular speciality of the experienced bureaucrat. It consists in explaining why ‘although there is clearly much merit in taking action designed to prevent future disaster, it is in the nature of the future that it is not in the present’, and that ‘there will therefore be time enough, anon, to deal with such matters’, and finally that ‘it would accordingly be somewhat foolhardy, minister, to put this particular pan on the front burner just at present’. This is, of course, a variant of the doctrine of ‘the more pressing question’. But it is in some ways subtler and more insidious because it does not depend upon the idea that it is more important to deal with what is immediate rather than with what is far off – just that it is not necessary to deal now with what can just as well be dealt with later. There may, after all, come a better time to deal with it, may there not?

Each of these doctrines is implicit rather than explicit. There isn’t any government or international manual or guidance or diktat or speech in which such doctrines are officially spelled out or even implicitly admitted. But you only have to talk to officials or ministers in almost any front-line government department in almost any country to hear them saying things that reveal the extent to which they are in the grip of such doctrines. And the effect is that the amount of time and energy that governments spend on the resilience of systems and networks is strictly limited, even in countries that take these issues most seriously.

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