The Revolution Might Be Televised, but you'll never see it. . .

Well, this, I think, is a real problem.

As boring as it is, the prospect of a cyber attack should be truly terrifying. Probably because it doesn't call on bravery and courage to wage, it doesn't capture our imagination the way that Top Gun style warfare does. There is no valor in a keystroke, and the thought of being rendered impotent by some dastardly Estonian's Javascript skills is too much for most folks to handle.

But the real danger of a cyber threat is that there are so many different kinds of them that it's hard to pinpoint what it would look like. It could be anything. And the worst danger is likely not from the attackers themselves but from our own selves. Even a temporary loss of civilizational infrastructure could devolve US culture to Lord of the Flies style savagery. We are a culture that has been coddled so long, has been wholly reliant on techno-comforts to do our thinking, our planning, and even our relaxing, that its sudden disappearance might leave us alone with only our atrophied instincts to protect us from the elements and ourselves.

Is this a serious problem? It might be. Depends on the nature of an attack. Shutting down power grids for a while might push all of us to the limit. Stymying bank databases might not. But a clever attacker would try us out in all sorts of ways. Civilization, we are told, is a thin veneer covering the basest of Hobbesian impulses. Even its temporary apocalypse might release the beast in all of us.

So we'll see.

Am I making too much of this? Possibly. But I think Clarke is right that it might take a Pearl Harbor attack to wake us up. Of course if none of us has TV, we might never know it happened. . .