Feeling Vulnerable

The 10 or so (depending on how you count them) Wallander novels are really good books in the Police Procedural type of mystery story. (These are not the whodunit novels perfected by Agatha Christie. Instead, you watch the police going through methodical steps trying to figure out what is going on and who is behind the troubles.) Firewall, I am sorry to say, is the weakest of the Wallander novels I have read. The reason why tells a tale.

The novel was originally published in 1998, which is fairly recent when compared to the history of the universe, but eons ago in computer age. Computers were common by the late 1990s, but the internet was just barely out of infancy. As a result, the world was neatly divided between people who knew how to use a computer and those who were helpless in front of a computer.

Firewall gets most of its tension from the fact that poor Kurt Wallander has absolutely no idea how computers work. None. He is afraid to even turn one on. It isn’t really clear that Mankell knows how computers work either, but he gets to mask his ignorance by having Wallander constantly tell people to skip all the technical details because he has no idea how computers work.

The lack of explanation about what is actually going on in the book when it comes to the computer stuff is a minor annoyance. Mankell writes well and Wallander is an interesting guy, so the book still works despite the goofy computer stuff. Well, it works until the last chapter when all the main mysteries are cleared up, but then the detectives riffle through a whole bunch of unexplained things from their investigations. I can’t remember a mystery novel with so many “clues” which are not only totally unexplained but actually inexplicable at the end of the book.

So much for the book. But, the line at the outset of this rumination, “We live in a vulnerable society,” is interesting. Why do the characters keep saying that? They are concerned about the fact that the world is becoming one giant interconnected computer web. A teenager in Sweden can hack into the Pentagon. A computer expert in the middle of nowhere can access every single large and important entity in the world. All you need is a computer and an internet connection and you can bring the whole world crumbling down.

Two decades later, we hear the same thing all the time. We are constantly under the threat of the entire internet, cell phones, satellites, electrical systems, missile defense systems, and financial systems, all of that going down at the same time leaving us in the Stone Age rubbing sticks together to make fire. (Have you ever tried to do that by the way? It is harder than it looks. Better start practicing.)

People feel vulnerable to cyberattacks. It worries them. A lot. So they say things like “We live in a vulnerable society.”

But do we? If the statement is mean simply to mean we do not live in a world with zero risk and thus are vulnerable to something, then obviously the answer is yes. But, that isn’t what the statement means. People are saying that we are more vulnerable now than we ever have been before. People are saying that because everything is connected to everything else, if you pull out just one small piece of wood, the whole thing collapses.

Are we now more vulnerable that we ever were before? Are we more threatened with disaster than at any time before?

Ages ago, imagine a human meeting a bear. Who wins? Yeah, humans have always been really vulnerable to wild animals…until we built better weapons. Then we became less vulnerable to them.

Famine? Drought? Locusts? Once upon a time, such things destroyed everything. Think of the Irish Potato Famine or the Oklahoma Dust Bowl. People were really vulnerable.

What about Blizzards and Hurricanes and Tornadoes and Floods? Again, once upon a time, such things were deadly to everyone in their path. People were really vulnerable.

Disease? The Black Death killed somewhere between 25% and 60% of the population of Europe. The Spanish Flu killed between 25 million and 100 million people (1.5% to 5% of the world’s population). Yeah, people used to be really vulnerable to plagues.

What is interesting about the modern world is how little vulnerability we have. Yes, I know that saying that right now in the midst of the “Greatest crisis of our lifetimes” seems like fighting words, but really it is not meant to be polemical at all. We actually are safer now, less vulnerable now to natural disasters and devastating catastrophes than ever before. As was noted in the recently reviewed Extreme Economies, a city can get absolutely leveled by a natural disaster in Indonesia, and a few years later a prosperous new city sits in exactly the same place. It is extraordinary when you think about it.

So, why do the characters in Firewall and people today constantly feel they are more vulnerable than in the past? I suspect it has to do with two things.

First, people understand Famines and Locusts; people do not understand Computers. So, if a giant swarm of locusts descends on your field and destroys your food supply, at least you can see the locusts munching away on what you planned to eat in winter. But a computer taking down the distribution network for food is mysterious, you don’t see it, and it can come from anywhere. That feels scarier even if it is not.

Second, because we are safer, every loss of safety, even a small one, feels very threatening. If every day you are looking up hoping there will not be too much or too little rain, then you know you are vulnerable. You never escape the feeling of vulnerability. But, now we live in an age where food is always plentiful at the grocery store, life spans are really long and medical care is jaw-droppingly amazing, and we are constantly in virtual contact with everyone. So any loss of that security, even a small loss of that security, ignites instant panic.

It’s a matter of perspective. Part of the problem with even talking about this is that the statement “We are less vulnerable today than ever before” is met with the retort (often angry) “We are still vulnerable!”  Of course we are still vulnerable. Less vulnerable does not mean invulnerable.

So, if you want to feel a bit better about life today, just look around at everything you have and be really glad you are not living in the 14^th century or even the early 20^th century.