What Happens When We Lose Power?
In the decades following the dot-com boom, we have seen an era of unmitigated technological achievement spill into every facet of our lives. From work to pleasure, the internet and screens have become synonymous with efficiency and organization — the gold standard of a life lived easier, better.
Recently, a new phrase has begun to romance techies and investors: the internet of things (IoT), a term coined in 1999. Ushered in by a myriad of applications/integrations seeking to digitize our refrigerators, replace our secretaries with AI, or measure the molecular breakdown of our urine, the internet of things represents the next frontier in connecting us with our environment and relegating the remainder of our wasted time to the nearest computer.
(NOTHING TO SEE HERE) It also represents the next step in technological commercialization.
While having a computer analyze my piss sounds great and all, it is imperative we understand that the romance we feel towards this technological boon is unrequited. It is in the best interest of the marketers to market their products. And when these shiny toys basically sell themselves, the only challenge left for the marketeers is to destroy any philosophical foundations left that thwart their revenue stream.
Metaphorical Power
“When a carpenter picks up a hammer, the hammer becomes, so far as his brain is concerned, part of his hand. When a soldier raises a pair of binoculars to his face, his brain sees through a new set of eyes, adapting instantaneously to a very different field of view…When the carpenter takes his hammer into his hand, he can use that hand to do only what a hammer can do. The hand becomes an implement for pounding and pulling nails. When the soldier puts the binoculars to his eyes, he can see only what the lenses allow him to see. His field of view lengthens, but he becomes blind to what’s nearby…
Every tool imposes limitations even as it opens possibilities.”
Nicholas Carr, The Shallows
This is the philosophical idea that drives tech investors bananas.
Every tool that amplifies an ability must also always weaken another natural human ability. In the example above, the carpenter may have been an excellent pianist, but if he gave up his hands to the hammer for the rest of his life, his hand would merely become a hole for which to insert the wood of the hammer. His hands would lose their calm dexterity once reserved for playing Mozart.
The power that we surrender when we relegate our responsibilities to technology is of immense importance. Not because we need to retain every single human skill, but because after those skills have disappeared, they can become valuable commodities for corporations to hold over our heads:
It’s a point neither newly made nor of interest to most of the people who buy “smart” objects. The internet was supposed to bring decentralization of power, but in fact it’s consolidated power in the hands of whatever company manages to build the first and/or best standard.
David J. Walbert, Rituals Of Embodiedness
Similar to the farming markets of the last 50 years, Americans lie at the mercy of politics and policy when it comes to buying fruits and vegetables at reasonable price. Having completely moved away from agrarian living, we now exist in a reality where most of us wouldn’t know how to plant a potato, let alone grow it.
If we don’t start asking ourselves bigger questions soon, we may find that we’ve fallen head over heels for an internet of things that just wanted our money and power all along.
Literal Power
This fundamental shift occurring in the way we depend on technology does not appear reversible and the accumulation of technology is expanding at an exponential rate. With everyone getting online, the stakes couldn’t be higher if, say, we lost a major power grid.
So what happens when the actual power goes out? We’ve seen this already:
This is Manhattan in 2012, after Hurricane Sandy. With the power out, tech consumers flocked to areas with plugs, free Wi-Fi, and running water (toilets). Who has all of these? Starbucks, obviously.
The story wasn’t any different here in Washington, D.C., nor in most of the urban areas reported along the east coast. In panicked chaos, places like Starbucks were filling up with angry people who absolutely needed to get their internet fix for the day. I’m exaggerating of course. I’m sure many of them had perfectly important reasons to be online.
This was 4 years ago and Sandy wasn’t completely debilitating.
The threat of power loss is something most tech evangelists will gloss over or even laugh about. To them, warning against a massive power failure is tantamount to Chicken Little and the sky falling.
But this story is real. And the threat more real.
About a dozen times in the last decade, sophisticated foreign hackers have gained enough remote access to control the operations networks that keep the lights on…In 2012 and 2013, in well-publicized attacks, Russian hackers successfully sent and received encrypted commands to U.S. public utilities and power generators; some private firms concluded this was an effort to position interlopers to act in the event of a political crisis. And the Department of Homeland Security announced about a year ago that a separate hacking campaign, believed by some private firms to have Russian origins, had injected software with malware that allowed the attackers to spy on U.S. energy companies.
For a country so fascinated with Hoverboards and Snapchat, the United States is remarkably lackadaisical when it comes to securing our energy infrastructure, both on the ground and against cyber warfare.
Power vulnerability is what makes me most hesitant to the internet of things and beyond that, skeptical of tech evangelists who ignore the power the grids hold over us and wish us to accept the wave of the future lying down.
I’m no green energy guy, but until we can confidently point to a secure, renewable energy source, we should take a step back from trying to digitize a world that prioritizes the internet of things over the power to sustain it. Furthermore we should be weary of databases and machines supplanting our human talents until we can draw a bold line between the things we wouldn’t miss if the world went dark, and the things we would…
