A Country Breaking Down
Elizabeth Drew
Collapsing bridges, late trains, rusted pipes, inadequate broadband
-New York Review of Books.
Yes...yes...that is part of my sense in "Does America Still Work?, a sense that the country is "breaking down." Ms. Drew reviews five books in her article, 2013 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure by the American Society of Civil Engineers, Rust: The Longest War by Jonathan Waldman, Move: Putting America’s Infrastructure Back in the Lead by Rosabeth Moss Kanter, The Road Taken: The History and Future of America’s Infrastructure by Henry Petroski, Lights Out: A Cyberattack, A Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath by Ted Koppel.
Not so much of the infrastructure though in my vague feeling, I have a sense of things that we can't see not being right, that we're not being told everything. For instance, the economic recovery from the Great Recession. I see the data, I see the unemployment rate, I listen to the monthly jobs reports, I see the stock market going up, the value of my mutual funds going up, the price of gasoline at the pump going down, and I give thanks to President Obama and the Republican congress. But it just does not feel real to me, I have this feeling that I cannot shake that behind the scenes bad, bad things were papered over, that the recovery was stitched together with scotch tape and chewing gum, that it isn't a recovery as much as an artificially recreated status quo ante. It seems to have required an enormous effort, the expenditure of humongous sums, and the use of extraordinary measures, like keeping interest rates at zero, just to get us back to where we were.
THAT is what I mean. $800 billion is a "JUMPSTART"? What if the battery's dead? If it cost $800 billion to jumpstart an otherwise sound car, how much if the battery is dead or the engine gone? More, I bet.
Broadband is our new interstate highway system...Depending on the measurement used, the United States ranks from fourteenth to thirtieth among all nations in its investments in infrastructure.
I know "broadband" has something to do with my computer and cell phone but I really don't know what it is. I'm "connected." When we lose our internet connection at the office and have to call Comcast what is that? Is that a broadband problem? It's a problem, it's an "infrastructure" problem, and we never have achieved "recovery." We are never "cured." Whatever is wrong never gets fixed permanently and the next time it rains really hard we'll lose our connection again. It's not so broken that it's useless, but it's not really fixed.
Like my iPhone. I swear, you buy the latest version of the iPhone and inside your first month they're prompting you that you have to do an "update." I THOUGHT IT WAS UP TO DATE! I BOUGHT THE LATEST VERSION. Why'd you fucking sell me something that wasn't updated?
Imagine you buy a new TV and within a month, every frigging time you turn it on there's a screen message, "software out of date. To install new software..." turn to channel 666. Or! You buy a new car; within a month your dashboard lights go on. You have to take it back to the dealer to fix something. I'll tell ya, there's be some dead TV repairmen and car dealers if that happened!
We suffer this with these newish computer gadgets because I think we sense we don't have this all figured out yet. There are "bugs" that need to be fixed, "patches" that need to be applied, again, there's the feeling of problems being papered over, of solutions stitched together on-the-fly and we have unease that it's not going to hold.
"...according to Koppel, “for the first time in the history of warfare, small groups, even individuals, can undermine the critical infrastructure of a state.” He offers evidence that questions...assurances...of the Department of Homeland Security that the electrical grid is “resilient” to attack. The malware in our adversaries’ computer systems could paralyze the nation, cripple our defense capacities, and cause major loss of lives.
Imagine you buy a new TV and within a month, every frigging time you turn it on there's a screen message, "software out of date. To install new software..." turn to channel 666. Or! You buy a new car; within a month your dashboard lights go on. You have to take it back to the dealer to fix something. I'll tell ya, there's be some dead TV repairmen and car dealers if that happened!
We suffer this with these newish computer gadgets because I think we sense we don't have this all figured out yet. There are "bugs" that need to be fixed, "patches" that need to be applied, again, there's the feeling of problems being papered over, of solutions stitched together on-the-fly and we have unease that it's not going to hold.
"...according to Koppel, “for the first time in the history of warfare, small groups, even individuals, can undermine the critical infrastructure of a state.” He offers evidence that questions...assurances...of the Department of Homeland Security that the electrical grid is “resilient” to attack. The malware in our adversaries’ computer systems could paralyze the nation, cripple our defense capacities, and cause major loss of lives.
Yeah. I don't think we've got this computer age dicked yet. There are so many bugs, patches, fixes, gaps, vulnerabilities, and we're feeling vulnerable, like it's using us, we're not using it. All I know is we need more broadband.
