Bring on the cyber apocalypse

OPINION:

Many “progressives” — particularly millennials — were horrified to learn that some Facebook data might have been used to help elect Donald Trump president. Conservatives understand that social media was used to elect both Mr. Trump in 2016 and Barack Obama in 2012. They can’t blame me; I have been off the social media grid since early 2012. Actually, I was never truly on it. I briefly opened a Facebook account when my son was in Afghanistan so I could see pictures of his surroundings. I quickly closed it after I began getting friend invitations from people I didn’t want to be friends with.

Same with LinkedIn. I once joined to communicate with a colleague when I was in a remote location in Afghanistan. Immediately, I started getting requests to be on my computer from people I didn’t want to communicate with on a daily basis — including the local Taliban commander. That’s when I took the “no social media pledge.” Many of my friends and relatives have been chiding me about being a cyber-Luddite until the recent Facebook scandal. That chatter dropped off very quickly.

I’m not totally off the Internet. I still have a smart phone, but I only use it to make calls and check email occasionally, and I’ll use email to submit this article.

But, that is about it. I will answer a text if I notice I’ve gotten one — and never when driving; I never initiate one. I’m semi-retired, so I don’t generally have bosses to answer to, and I never accept a contract that would require me to be connected 24/7. I did disconnect the landline phones in my various houses as the only people who were calling me on them were telemarketers. But in an emergency, I can drive down to the phone company and reconnect if needed.

If I ever caught the networking virus, I’ve gotten over it. Sadly however, many in our nation have been infected and the disease rules their lives. Not all of these people are millennials. The other day in the express check-out line at the supermarket, a woman in her 50s was talking on her cell phone while trying to type in her access code to the card-reading machine.

Millennials can do this as they have been multitasking all their lives, but the effort was beyond this shopper’s abilities. Consequently, all 10 people in the express check-out line got to hear about her daughter’s medical appointment. We also learned her pin number because she asked the clerk to type it in for her. The idea of saying; “could you hold on a minute while I pay my bill?” never occurred to her.

Sadly, the networking disease is not limited to a disappearance of public civility. The military has become computer dependent in recent years to a point where some observers have concluded that a massive denial of service attack by an opponent that has figured out how to protect its own systems, could be critical in the first stages of a future conflict. Additionally, we all know how dependent our economy has become on cyber transactions.

I am afraid that we will see a cyber apocalypse within the next decade. Conventional wisdom has it that it is impossible to take down the World-Wide Web; but every time something has been declared impossible, someone has done it. I hope it doesn’t happen. I am as fond of my email and using my credit cards as the next guy, but its disappearance may not be an entirely bad thing.

Depending on whether a cyber apocalypse lasts a few days or months, civilization will recover. The United States is an incredibly complex adaptive system. However, in the interim, people may learn how to conduct civil discourse again. People on a date in a restaurant may actually learn how to have a face-to-face conversation rather than texting each other, and some people may actually learn that Western civilization will survive without a picture on Facebook of what they had for lunch.

One would hope that the U.S. military is making contingency plans for fighting when the screens go dark. It matters little if the cyber apocalypse is caused by the Chinese, Russians or some millennial sitting in Mom’s basement eating Cheetos. Any institution — civil or military — that does no have back-up plans for a cyber disaster is remiss. As for me, I’m ready. I can still plug in my landline. I have a roll of Forever Stamps and I’m not afraid to use them.

• Gary Anderson is a retired Marine Corps colonel. As chief of staff of the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab in the 1990s, he oversaw early exploration of cyber warfare issues