For years the infosec community has languished under regular excitable and excited claims that we imminently face “Digital Pearl Harbor” — a surprise cyber-offensive that will decapitate either of:
- a somehow-national internet, like a specifically British internet or specifically American internet — neither of which exist; or:
- some Critical National Infrastructure attached to the same, e.g.: Air Traffic Control, even though such CNI seems entirely capable of taking itself down — and if “we” as a nation are not conducting Disaster Recovery scenarios upon those grounds then we deserve whatever happens to us
What’s far more likely in this era of burgeoning fragmentation and federation is that one or more online communities will ideologically isolate themselves — e.g. for a failure of the world to submit to the orthodoxy of their preferred content moderation — and then metaphorically explode or implode, either (the former) through involvement of law enforcement, or (the latter) though cultural toxicity.
Nobody wants to talk about this issue in such terms, not least because it provides little opportunity for selling products to the government. Woe to a doomed metaphor.
But of course it could also be that this has already happened, repeatedly, to varying extents, in many places, and… just that nobody really noticed or cared.
Same as Digital Pearl Harbor, really.
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