If the internet fails we cannot go back to the systems that helped us to run our lives in the 1950s, when we had only one-third of the population to worry about. We are growing from 7 to 9 billion people, whether we like it or not, and we therefore need the right systems to manage a world of 9 billion people. Very few people fully realise the impact of this population growth in such an incredibly short period.
The reason this is hardly ever discussed is due to the incredibly parochial view that countries have – pretending to their voters that they can still operate and solve their problems in isolation, and protect themselves from ‘foreign evil’. One only has to look at the enormous political dramas surrounding the refugee issues in the various western countries. Governments rise and fall based on populous politics, often involving no more than a few thousand refugees who either can or cannot come into the country.
Yet an internet failure will be far more disastrous than any border protection failure. In order to safeguard our future, politicians and the media need to start looking beyond local politics. It will be the global issues that will rule the future of our local society and local economy. We need to manage these systems on a larger scale and not see them just as sovereign local issues. And yet most political systems around the world are still rooted in that narrow parochial space.
Countries can no longer immunise themselves against this ‘too big to fail’ problem, through local policies. Perhaps one of the biggest threats to the problem is the inability of our political systems to deal with it, which could mean that a sudden failure would hit them as a ‘total surprise’.
To a certain extent the internet needs to be treated as a foreign country. It is no longer under the control of any individual country – no, not even the USA – and, equally, no country can afford to disconnect itself, since our future will depend on the abovementioned increase in connectivity. No developed country can simply cut off or decrease connectivity – that would result in economic disaster and, as we have already seen in some countries, social upheaval.
Draconian rules to ‘protect’ the internet from misuse, either internal or external are also no longer an option. We have seen that basically all western countries have been investing billions of dollars in internet technologies that allow them to spy on each other in the broadest sense of the word – on companies, people, governments, institutions and so on. What security agencies can do, rogue countries, criminal and terrorist organisations can do also. So we had better be prepared.