Security is becoming such an issue these days on the internet – as was just prophecized in a book out this year called Future Crimes by Marc Goodman (a former cop) that a new report, also just out, concludes that the cost of securing your online properties may soon outstrip all possibility of making a profit on the Internet. Some Singularity.
Some Utopia.
Indeed, I guess I am in the Stephan Metcalf camp, from the Slate Culture Gabfest podcast, when, in this episode, he mocks Kurzeil and his ilk as dangerous – even delusional. And they seem to be – Peter Diamandis, of Abundance fame, preaches that everything is going to be so cheap and plentiful so that the problem of thousands and millions of years of evolution – too little of everything leading to the Darwinian fight for survival we seem to have been bred from – has nonetheless led to a radical reversal where the problem of human civilization is too much of everything. Sound great, right?
Funny how these guys are based in California. There is an “abundance” of water there, right now, right?
Indeed, it becomes clearer and clearer after reading the now retired (from writing his brilliant column in an Austin, Texas paper) Michael Ventura, and others like Joel Kotkin, that what Silicon Valley is selling is not in fact merchandise, or even more efficient business processes, but ideology with a huge religious undertone. That life will soon cease being a struggle. Just trust them. Sound familiar – re: the same story as in Yuval Noah Hariri’s Sapiens.
Actually, it is not only, and perhaps not primarily big companies that may first be wiped out by cyber-crime. They at least have resources. The global creatives, beaten down and battered by free music, piracy of other sorts, the end of print journalism and other hits to culture outlined in books by the likes of Jaron Lanier, Scott Timber, and several others, resulting in, as the title of a book by Nobel Laureate Peruvian Writer Mario Vargas Llosa: The Death of Culture — so that one of the few enclaves of creativity left to myself seemed to be the new digital world of web pages and apps.
So that is of course what I and most other creatives have gravitated to lately. But I am on the front lines in this cyber war, and we are all coming to be. And since the online world is my bread and butter, when cyber attacks come my way they are perhaps as threatening as the assasins of old coming from the next camp with their flaming arrows…
One of my sites was hacked, and I now find myself fixing friend’s websites which have also been hacked. My arsenal is growing. I am at war. But as that report questions – is the price of participation really still worth it – or am I just catastrophizing?
