Yesterday's IT outage was serious and debilitating. It clearly had an effect on some readers of this blog because traffic was well down early in the day, but recovered later.
It has reinforced an already reached conclusion from the thinking, training and planning Thomas and I have been involved in (between other duties) this week. We have been looking at how to take video, audio and other production forward and the conclusion we have reached is that buying the latest or highest specified kit will not be necessary in all cases.
There are better cameras and lenses than we have. The same is true of microphones. But what we have is very good, and that is good enough. What is more, if we need a second camera (and we think we will, simply to extend recording times, if nothing else, because mirrorless cameras have a habit of overheating) then the second camera may not need to be as fully specced as the main one.
What has this to do with that outage? It is simply that by pushing things to the limit they can more easily go wrong.
As we build ever more complex systems the likelihood of that grows.
There is an obsession amongst politicians and Silicon Valley for tech-led growth, which seems to be intimately related to far right thinking. But is that whole logic pushing us all in the wrong direction, and not just politically? Is growth that is undoubtedly dependent on trashing the planet worth having? Or is there something else that is ‘good enough' that would actually be much better for us?
It is a question worth asking.
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We can say goodbye to the idea of the cashless society too for now obvious reasons. Similarly CBDCs for those same reasons. Without the sort of reliable digital infrastructure we don’t have and clearly have little idea of how to establish and maintain, both ideas are dead in the water. So, I might add, is IDS and his ludicrous “Digital by default” theories of social security distribution, bad at the best of times & wholly inadequate at others. One cynically wonders though whether the new teams at the relevant departments will take this observation to heart as much as they clearly should.
Well you and your son engaged in some critical thinking clearly Microsoft have not in terms of ensuring a “dummy-run” takes place in regard to third-party software forming part of their “Windows” software. The same problem occurred in the UK in regard to the Covid pandemic which I would argue was a product of group think in the Tory Party in regard to fiat money reality. No alternative thinking was allowed in regard to this reality namely the importance of stopping to think how money can be safely created for use as a national currency or rather medium of account. This resulted in judging that government spending was the spawn of the devil especially on something that might not happen or be very serious in its impact like a virus based global pandemic!
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/jul/18/covid-inquiry-hallett-prescribes-red-teams-as-antidote-to-flawed-thinking
Might « growth » without active attention to its effects on the generality of people, and other forms of our environment, be distorted, and so dangerous thinking and, perhaps more relevantly, dangerous attitude misuse?
Might it be a form of « Single Factor Error »?
Growth which is dependent on finite resources is, clearly, itself finite. There can be no other conclusion. Therefore any policies or plans which require growth are limited. Where are the ideas for sustainable existence?