At The Baffler, Heather Havrilesky writes about the increasing concern—or is it paranoia?—among “security experts” that the spread of information technology makes governments and ordinary people alike vulnerable to innumerable grave cyber “threats.” Reviewing two recent books on the subject, Havrilesky notes that while much of this concern is overblown, the rise of personal data collection does indeed expose us to new dangers, from corporations and criminal alike:
Consider two recently published studies in the genre, which present the future as a looping montage of doom: The Future of Violence: Robots and Germs, Hackers and Drones—Confronting a New Age of Threat by Benjamin Wittes and Gabriella Blum (Basic Books, $29.99) and Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman (Doubleday, $27.95). Of course, the kinds of upper-middle-class neurotics who buy books about the future do love to have the living daylights scared out of them. And both of these titles will lavishly reward those in the market for good, old-fashioned (futuristic!) thrills and chills. To hear Wittes, Blum, and Goodman tell it, countless horrors await us, most of them caused by exotic and mysterious enemies lurking around every corner of the globe, using advanced technologies to reach hapless victims thousands of miles away.
In both of these tech-dystopian works, the future is an anxious bird, flying in circles over a hot, flat, crowded landscape, biding its time until an ISIS-operated drone sprays weaponized bird flu in its face. What else can it do? The clock is ticking down and nothing is sustainable. The seas are boiling, filthy with plastic bags and drowning polar bears; the smoggy air will soon be swarming with (more) U.S. military drones, rogue-state nuclear drones, homemade bioweaponry, and Amazon’s fleet of robotic delivery devices.
Image by David Gothard, via The Baffler
