Storm Clouds

With every natural catastrophe that takes place, we wind up learning a little bit more about technology, what it can and cannot do, facts about its potentials and limitations, how it can dramatically fail, and what can be done better for the future.  "Superstorm Sandy" left us with no shortage of such teaching points.  But will we pay attention and make the necessary adjustments?

Nobody could have accurately predicted all of the crises that Sandy spurred in the Northeast beginning on that day in late October.  High winds of such a magnitude were a first for many of us.  We saw flooding in places that had never taken on water before.  And the aftermath was almost as much of a crisis as the storm itself, as people faced being cut off from various forms of technology for up to two weeks or even more.  In so many ways, this was all new ground.

To preface this analysis, we should emphasize how important it is to be able to survive without all of the gadgets and gizmos we've become accustomed to.  Not only survive, but thrive.  This doesn't have to mean building bomb shelters and keeping a huge stockpile of supplies, unless you really feel the end of the world as we know it is nigh.  But being able to get along without electricity, phones, or the Internet for a period of time shouldn't be that much of a challenge for any of us.  The real problems come when catastrophic events occur that we didn't expect - or when a relatively simple solution is overlooked that could have prevented mass inconvenience or possibly danger.

The first thing we noticed in the storm's aftermath was how thoroughly cell service was wiped out in so many areas.  This is something well worth focusing on, since so many people now use cell phones as their primary means of communication.  If you were such a person in that particular region, you likely found yourself completely cut off and unable to make any phone calls.

Landlines, as usual, fared much better.  There were exceptions, such as lower Manhattan, which had many of its Verizon lines flooded and taken out of service for far longer than anything else.  But for those people who lost power and cable due to overhead lines coming down, the old-fashioned landline managed to stay in service more times than not.  Telco lines tend to be more rugged or are buried underground more frequently.  Those phone lines that arrive via cable company wiring also didn't fare as well, leaving many people who made that switch with no means of communicating.  (Of course, you also need power on your end to keep the modem up for such a line.)

In addition to the physical connection still being there, the landline has another huge advantage.  The central office that it runs through is required to have backup generators.  This goes back to the days when this was the only place phone lines came from, so it was easy to have such a blanket regulation.  What this results in is a system that doesn't go down, even when an entire neighborhood has been plunged into darkness.

Compare this to your typical cell tower, which might have a battery backup, but most certainly has no generator to keep it going after the power is drained.  Cell companies have successfully fought proposals that would have required them to have such a feature.  The result of that was what we saw after Sandy: no service signals for significant distances and customers without landlines completely cut off.  To be fair, it may be economically unfeasible to equip every cell tower with a generator.  But it's perfectly within reason to inform consumers of this shortcoming before they make the decision to have cell phones become their primary means of communication.

Of course, our local phone companies could have been a lot more on top of their game as well.  In Manhattan (where cell service was drastically reduced but still somewhat available).  we also had the option of communicating via one of our friendly payphones.  However, the majority of the ones we sampled, along with most of the ones we've heard about, were out of service or not in good operating condition for one reason or another.  It's true that payphones are used far less frequently than in the past, a fact we frequently bemoan in our payphone photo section.  But that's not a license to simply abandon them.  After all, any well designed system has a series of backups built into it.  We should consider payphones to be one such backup, archaic as they may appear.  (Ironically, newer payphones do require power and, thus, are fairly useless during extended blackouts.)  While the old design and lack of a need for power is a huge advantage in an emergency, the overly expensive rates and lack of care cancel out that advantage.  Their existence is clearly vital, but they should be brought into this century and interfaced so much better with other existing communication networks.  Perhaps then, they wouldn't fall into disrepair so often.

Access to the Internet was also severely affected during the crisis and this made life very difficult for anyone who was addicted.  Again, being flexible and having backups on an individual level makes all the difference.  Our smartphones and tablets are great for getting content - when there's a way of doing so.  When such access goes away, we need quick and ready alternatives, which are often simply the old-fashioned methods that were replaced by the (now unavailable) new technology: newspapers, books, stores that sell these things, local broadcasts that can be received on small and cheap battery powered receivers, etc.  It's not really that hard to come up with ideas since these things already exist.  What seems to be the real challenge is hanging on to them, rather than declaring them obsolete and moving in the direction that we think is forward.

This is not at all a rejection of the technology, but simply a realization that the technology alone isn't enough.  Loathe as we are to do so, imagine a world where something like Sandy has an effect that lasts a year or maybe longer.  Imagine it encompassing a far greater space.  Without venturing into full-on survivalist mode, let's consider the effects that such an outage would have just on our technology and how we would deal with that.  Much of our personal information would exist only on electronic devices we could no longer access.  (Many of us don't even know our friends' phone numbers anymore since our phones use voice activation or speed dialing to call them.  And that's just the tip of the iceberg.)  Physically, these devices are so complex with microscopic components that nobody would ever be able to reproduce them without complex machinery.  All of our reading material, words that we've written, pictures we've taken, our music videos, etc. - all put into digital form and only accessible on the proper device - or somewhere in the nebulous cloud.

It's all really awesome when everything is working and a complete catastrophe when it grinds to a halt.  Even something as annoyingly mundane as a software incompatibility could separate you from content that is yours.  Such a thing could go undetected for years, thus lessening the chances of easily regaining access if/when the problem was discovered.  Glitches and corruption can wipe data out, sometimes without being noticed.

The fact is we don't know what unpredictable things await us in the future.  To underline the point, we're reasonably certain that if the great works of the past thousand years or so had only been stored on the digital media of the time, a significant amount of it would have been forever lost.  If you doubt that, try and dig up the first digital photos you ever took.  Or open up some documents that were stored on your old Mac Plus, assuming you held onto any of that old stuff.

Clearly, being hackers, we're big into technology.  But we're also big into experimentation, what-if scenarios, thinking outside the box, and exposing bad ideas and stupid actions.  As always, learn everything you can about the technology, don't accept limitations and restrictions designed to keep control out of your hands, and assume it will all go to hell at some point and have a plan so you don't go with it.  One of the most important qualities of a decent hacker is the ability to adapt and learn as the rules change.  If those in the mainstream didn't learn the importance of this from Sandy, it may be up to us to keep pointing it out.  Because in the end, the technology is simply an extension of our minds.  If we become crippled with the loss of these tools, then we haven't really learned anything.