(OPINION) An oil tanker ploughs into a tourist beach. Planes fall from the sky. Driverless cars run amok. The internet fails and the mobile network dies. Feral instincts take over as people fight for food, water and medicine amid the ruins of civilization.
That is the nightmare vision depicted in Leave The World Behind, Netflix’s recent hit film starring Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke as a couple battling societal breakdown when the technology that underpins civilisation collapses.
It’s fictional, but it touches on deep-seated, real-life fears.
The film is produced by Michelle and Barack Obama’s company, Higher Ground.
The ex-president was closely involved in shaping the plot, which dramatises many of the cyber-security issues on which he was briefed during his eight years in the White House.
For our 21st-century lives are almost entirely dependent on complex technologies that many do not understand — and that can so easily be exploited by our enemies.
Maintaining a car, for example, was previously a job for any competent motorist and their local mechanic.
Now our vehicles are computers on wheels, their inner workings a mystery.
We used to navigate with paper maps and landmarks. But with his car’s satnav out of action, Ethan Hawke’s character Clay Sandford is unable even to find his way to the nearby town.
Our telephone system used to run on sturdy copper wires, with handsets you could fix with a screwdriver. Now it is a branch of cyberspace.
So, too, is finance. Remember when a credit card’s embossed number left an imprint on a paper slip? Not any more. Our payment system depends wholly on electronic encryption.
What use is cash in the modern world? In the film, with the internet gone, it becomes a prized asset.
If the technologies we rely on break down, many of us will be as helpless as Hawke’s Clay Sandford. ‘I am a useless man,’ he howls, as the crutch of technology is kicked from underneath him.
So could it really happen? The harsh truth is that modern life is perilously fragile.
We are just one weekly shop, one tank of petrol, away from helplessness, starvation and death. How did we become so vulnerable?
The internet was created so that academic computers could connect with one another.
Today, it is the central nervous system of our civilisation. It has brought untold benefits to our lives and the global economy — but our failure to think about security means that this miraculous progress has come with dangerous flaws.
Ransomware is a cyber scam in which attackers scramble vital databases to extort money from victims.
Such attacks are crude but effective. They typically begin when someone unwisely clicks a link in an email. That enables ‘malware’ — malevolent software — to infect the victim’s computer and its connected networks.
Crooks will, for a price, then supply an electronic key that unscrambles the vital data. The ransom payment is, of course, made in untraceable cryptocurrency. The attackers do not care if they are putting careers, happiness, health or even lives at risk. They are interested only in financial gain.
Last October, one such attack crippled the British Library. The ‘Rhysida’ cyber-gang claimed responsibility and leaked private employee data — including passports and addresses — while demanding Bitcoin cryptocurrency to the value of £600,000.
Ultimately, the full-scale societal collapse depicted in Leave The World Behind is — from a technological standpoint — somewhat overblown.
The software was used to infect the centrifuges at the heart of Iran’s nuclear weapons programmes, making the fragile components spin irregularly, causing severe damage and leaving them wrecked.
Netflix’s Leave The World Behind, and the 2020 novel by Rumaan Alam on which it is based, avoids any specifics about the nature of the attack that dooms its central characters. Viewers are left guessing whether the perpetrators are terrorists, a hostile state or even conspirators within America.
And that is an important point. Attributing cyber-attacks can be hard.
What looks like petty cyber-crime can, in fact, be an industrial-scale enterprise run by a terrorist group, a criminal gang or the North Korean regime.
Perhaps we should follow the example of American Doomsday ‘preppers’ by building our own bunkers, complete with hydroponic terrariums — small glasshouses — to grow food, generators and solar panels, independent water supplies, air purification systems, gold coins and a year’s supply of canned and dried food.
Indeed, Netflix’s drama ends with the Sandfords’ daughter Rose abandoning her family to hunker down in just such a space.
If we were to go down this route, some level of preparation would be prudent.
A battery-powered torch and radio, some food and drink, first-aid and essential medicines, warm clothing, a ‘cash stash’ and similar necessities would be wise purchases.
A new emergency alerts system introduced last year allows the government to send messages to millions of people’s mobile phones in a crisis.
And a Resilience Forum brings together public, private and voluntary groups to plan ‘whole of society’ emergency responses.
