Like those devices of yours, all connected to the Internet and so hackable, American businesses, hospitals, and public utilities can also be hijacked from a distance thanks to the software that helps run their systems. I’m thinking about vulnerabilities that lurk in your garage (your car), your house (your computer), and even your pocket (your phone). But that’s so twentieth century of you.Īmerica’s most urgent infrastructure vulnerability is largely invisible and unlikely to be fixed by the Biden administration’s $2 trillion American Jobs Plan. Or crumbling bridges all over the country. Or the dismal state of public transportation in your city. Maybe when I say that what comes to mind are all the potholes on your street. TomĪmerica has a serious infrastructure problem. Sci-fi is, it seems, now the essence of our lives. This is us, as John Feffer, author of the Dispatch novel Songlands (to be published June 1st), the final volume of his Splinterlands trilogy, makes clear today. But if, as I crouched under my school desk then waiting for a Russian nuclear bomb to explode, someone had told me that someday life could essentially be brought to a raging stand-still by a “cyber-apocalypse” (and you had explained to me what that was), I would have thought you the most inventive science-fiction writer of our times. Yes, in those years when I was growing up, our duck-and-cover thoughts often turned apocalyptic, given the looming threat of nuclear destruction then. And let me say that, in more than 18 years of writing such introductions for original articles at this website, I’ve never felt quite as inadequate or unprepared as I do for today’s remarkable piece by John Feffer. I’ve been introducing articles at TomDispatch for 18 years now - a strange form that developed because, once upon a time in another age, it was a listserv in which I gathered pieces from publications around the world and introduced them to my readers, email by email. No one was capable of carrying them around in their pockets or checking the news on them, no less using them to text friends. In other words, call me a relic of another age, of a world in which telephones were significant-sized objects that sat somewhere in your house and that you hustled over to pick up when they rang. Don’t ask me to send you a photo of anything or check my email on it or hail an Uber with it. And though I can indeed make calls on it and use it to check how far I’ve walked each day, footstep by footstep, it’s remarkable how much I can’t do. Let me try to put this in context: it was just months ago that I gave up my old flip phone and reluctantly got an iPhone.
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