Global and instant magnification of stupidity as we watch the dream of the Internet failing

The Internet was conceptualized as a fail-safe system of communication in 1960s to keep lines of communication open in case of catastrophic warfare. The design of the Internet, and the subsequent WWW protocols developed in early 1990s dream of a distributed system with no single point of failure.

However, yesterday, on July 19, 2024, everything from airports to hospitals to banks across the world came to standstill. The human civilization came to standstill again due to a null file of microscopic size, for a few hours, reliving the memory of Covid-19 virus induced standstill that we experienced four years ago.

This was not a cyber-attack, not a malware, not a computer virus, not a computer worm, not a ransomware. This was result of design flaw in the architecture of the subsequent layers of the Internet, caused by deliberate choices made by technology corporations, by governments, by telecom companies, and by venture capitalists. The additional layers of the Internet laid in late 1990s’ dot com boom to web 2.0 of 2000s to web 3.0 and now GenAI layer of 2020s deliberately created centralized powers of control to accumulate wealth, and more importantly to accumulate information, and to disseminate disinformation from centralized control points.

When one creates global centers of concentration for whatever reasons, those very centers become single point of failure for the Internet and now since the Internet is backbone of humanity, this transmits into single point of failure for human society.

This centralized power allowed global and instant magnification of stupidity of one developer team in one company with political connections to bring human society to its knees for one day.

This is scary concentration of power. Will it change? Will we ever go back to the original design of the Internet? I guess never.