It seems that society is consistently obsessed with creating fantasy situations, whether in an attempt to prepare for the future, or simply just for entertainment. Disaster virus films like Outbreak and the recently released Contagion focus on the helplessness of man to mutated biology. Simply browsing the wikipedia page for Disaster Films, it becomes increasingly obvious that there are a large number of films that focus on natural epidemics and causes, but fail to highlight technological disasters. Either there haven’t been films focusing primarily on a computer virus or hack leading to a wide spread disaster, or we haven’t collectively determined these incidents to be “disasters”. This concept of a technological disaster may not be taken seriously because an incident cannot, at this time, directly physically harm someone. Although when considering society’s extreme dependence on technology, a serious widespread bug could cause irreperable damage.
Although logistically it seems unlikely that one program, virus or bug could cause irreparable damage and spread as quickly as a biological virus, there are physical ways of causing damage that could affect the technological. According to Celias, if the Internet was a country, it would be the fifth largest energy consumer in the world.
So even by limiting energy consumption alone, there could potentially be some major shifts. Physical copies of data have become virtually obsolete, so a well planned attack on server houses could cause some pretty serious damage. As we move more towards considering technology an extension of the biological, maybe there will be more disaster movies focused on technology.
Analyzing viral attacks ultimately comes down to intention–a technological disaster could be the result of a natural disaster, or a strategically planned attack. With technological disasters though, the intention would be strikingly obvious (unlike a biological attack)–either the accident is a result of another occurrence (earthquake, bomb, etc), or it stands as a lone incidence. In order to effectively cause damage to major server systems, it would require immense inside planning–almost to an impossible degree. But the impossible does not exist in entertainment, so it still baffles me that more movies, books, etc have not pondered the implications of a technological attack in a real world setting.
Even small disturbances (ANON, host failures) can cause quite a big of damage to businesses–so imagine if those small attacks were permanent. Personally, if my Google Docs isn’t accessible for more than a few hours, things go wrong. I can’t even imagine if entire databases were lost all together. Do you think that as society accepts technology in a more biological, natural sense we will proportionally see more disaster films concerning the subject? Or do our current systems seems too fail-safe to even ponder the idea?
It is interesting to see that even with as much hype has arised over technological mishaps (for example, the panic over Y2K), our media does not pick up on it in the same way it picks up on national disaster.
I think that goes perfectly with your point about the concept of the physical: a computer virus cannot physically harm someone, it cannot cause a natural disaster, and it cannot affect physical copies of information.
When we do see panic over technological disasters is when if affects businesses. When the focus of computer viruses and technological epidemics focuses on the individual, rather that the big business, it will become more of an issue to people. You can see this in instances where hacker groups have publicized large amounts of personal data, individuals get much more upset than if it is hacking a company website and changing it’s appearance.
Our technological systems are not fail-safe on any level. I think we rely to heavily on something that is bound to fail inevitably. And technology starts with the small nodes like mobile phones or tablets. My iPhone has experienced many problems through it’s life span. Those problems may have just been with the OS, but it still is problems.
Maybe, what we experience on a smaller level is simply accidental and with no intention of loosing data. But as far as a system-wide issue it would have to travel via the Internet because there is no other way. Severs crash every day and our personal devices have problems here and there, but do I think there is a way for everything to crash at once, Yes. I agree with what you said that is would be seemingly impossible and an immense job, but it could be done.