May 9th, 2021. It Just Costs Too Much.

This is only loosely related to the post overall, but there’s some -ish to it. This is dawn on my street. I don’t see it often, but because I need the money and someone else has plenty of it I’ve been hired to run a Zoom B’nai Mitzvah – and though it looks to be bright and sunshiney now, by the time I was done with my hour-long drive just enough rain was threatening to chase us in-doors. An angry aunt muttered as she wandered around pointing at her phone and showing that there was only a 15% chance of rain… and that what was going on outside would dry up at least 5 minutes before we were supposed to go Live. It was pretty useless to explain that setting up in five minutes wasn’t possible and the decision had been made… she actually SAID “well God smiled on this family. God graced them with two beautiful twins. God wouldn’t let it rain on THEIR DAY!!!” I did NOT reply “well, God isn’t insuring our gear” because I’m pretty sure she doesn’t care about that monetary risk.

I feel like no-one’s talking about the dangers of infrastructure attacks. It should be something flashing red on peoples’ screens, but much like the Pandemic and, on an even greater scale, the shifting dangers of climate change – I believe it’s literally too intangible for most people to grasp.

And that’s why we’ve got a government – but even the governments’ hands are tied by popular opinion – and yet allowing the governments’ hands to be tied by public opinion is simply a highway to self-destruction. No-one wants to pay to have a street paved, but they want to blame someone when their car bottoms out with a pothole. Everyone wants a path towards independent self-reliance but they don’t want to acknowledge the road that got them there. On a daily basis we expect our phones to work but don’t understand the infrastructure that allows them to be so indispensable and we ignore how MUCH infrastructure is required to ALLOW them to be so indispensable… and just how fragile and vulnerable it all is.

I’m as human as anyone. Maybe more so. My mechanic, Caesar, teases me about my car. Early on in the relationship I made it clear that I don’t want details. I want it to go. It doesn’t have to be pretty. I don’t care where the seams are or if the welds show. Just make it GO. But with that understanding I take his advice! I trust him to steer me in the right directions – pun intended. But he teases me none-too-gently about the fact that I’ve clearly ignored some noises, and really only come to him when problems get on-the-verge of dangerous. (this past weekend was QUITE expensive as he literally replaced the parts of the car that keep the wheels on, because I literally had driven my Saturn till the wheels were coming OFF)

Now I’m hearing that Noise he warned me about. I know I need to go back for some finishing touches. I hear the warning sound. I’ll take his advice. Before the parts come off.

But we have no one entity in charge of our overall infrastructure – and the myriad people who ARE charged with keeping it all going aren’t trusted – and beyond that there are conflicting incentives. Make it go. But make it cheap. Make it private. But make it free. Keep it open. Make it closed. Keep it anonymous. Make it secure. Probably dozens of conflicting sentiments that in a way are very, very American.

And so that’s how I ended up INDOORS with almost 20 other people packed into a very nice house of not-so-nice people all complaining about being in-doors but ALSO complaining about how cold it was because the windows were open since I’m still 4 days away from my second vaccination. The unpleasantness will only have been worth it once I’ve got my check AND once I’ve gone a week without coming down with fucking COVID because in all this time I’ve managed to NOT do anything this stupid. (I’m sure the above statement about God watching over the family didn’t extend to the Help)

On a day-to-day, personal scale, Capitalism seems a viable path. Our wallets shall vote louder than our voices and we very literally can show a competitive marketplace how much any given thing is worth to us. We decide our safety is worth x, our privacy is worth y. Speed is worth one thing, style another.

And so on a personal basis we can choose to pay a premium for a computer that seems more secure, or we can go low-grade and simple – but the levels of complexity are HUGE even on that personal level, far greater than our friendly GUI gadgets would imply. But on a national basis, these little decisions can’t be made by penny-pinching individuals nor by corporations so paranoid about their bottom line that they skimp on security because the return is better for their investors.

So far it’s worked out. Sure… some ransoms have been paid, Baltimore City cops had to hand write reports for a year. Some people died because hospitals got their files encrypted because they were still running Windows XP. Hackers tried to dump poison into the water supply of a small town in Florida, but an employee visually spotted that their computer was being manipulated. We’ve been LUCKY.

This weekend the east coast’s fuel supply has been held hostage by a hacking attempt and it’s downplayed by the press : consumers shouldn’t feel any pain at the pump as long as the shutdown only lasts “a few days”. Don’t panic. It’s not like it’ll cost you any money. Don’t worry about it.

But until we worry about it… and worry EXTENSIVELY about it… it’s only going to get worse. Just as on a personal level it’s my car’s wheels falling off, or on a local municipal level it’s a bridge collapse – with our infrastructure at stake it’s going to be a successful poisoning. It’s going to be sewage in the streets. It’s going to be a prison release. It’s going to be a nuclear meltdown.

But it hasn’t cost enough yet to be worth the price.