Lights Out! Can America Survive an Attack on the Electrical Grid?

Ted Koppel’s book Lights Out! Is four years old as of this writing, but if you think that makes the scary picture he paints obsolete, think again.

Ted Koppel scares the pants off anyone who cares.

Looking for updated info on the vulnerability if the U.S. electrical grid, all I could find was a number of news articles reporting that the grid had been infiltrated by a foreign powers in 2017, deep enough to shut most of it down at any time if they so desired.

I also found lots of articles and videos about how Koppel thinks the NYT, MSNBC, WAPO and other liberal-slanted publications are openly anti-45. Koppel has apparently been on Fox News saying so, and he’s very critical of the degradation of American journalism and the shift from actual news to 24/7 punditry and outrage.

OK, well, yeah. I’m not a fan of Fox News, and when I read that two of Koppel’s best friends are Henry Kissinger and Orrin Hatch, I confess it did send a little shiver down my spine, and not in a good way.

But that’s all ad hominem, isn’t it? Let’s get back to Koppel’s concerns about the grid, which, as laid out in this book, are absolutely terrifying and well-documented–documented it used to be, back when we had journalists and reporters and so forth. It turns out that the U.S. leads the world in the capability for cyber attack, but when it comes to defense, we are not so great.

Again, yeah. The 2016 election illustrated that, and though I’m not exactly a right winger, I have to agree with Koppel that the American public’s love of outrage is taking us down a dark, dark path. There’s outrage addiction on both sides, and the outrage is all so tribal that not much on the side of rationality and issue-focused discussion squeaks out.

Imagine your outrage as a spiked chain with a rope on it, and every time some entity wants to get you riled up, he, she, or it just gives that chain a yank, and boom! Twitter storm, marching in the streets, screaming at the Thanksgiving Day table… you’ve all been there, I know you have.

Aren’t you just sick of it. Why can’t we take a break from foaming at the mouth and focus some energy and analysis on our vulnerable infrastructure?

Because we don’t believe an attack can happen, or we kind of know it will happen but it’s so scary to think about and so expensive to fix, we can’t bear to think about it let alone make plans.

Think you could survive a 6 to 12 month electrical outage that covered many states? Unless you live on a self-sustaining ranch in Wyoming or you are a Mormon, you probably won’t survive that. Sure you can lay in months of dried food and bottled water, but after it becomes clear the lights aren’t coming on anytime soon and after grocery stores run out of food, someone is going to show up at your door and take your dried food away from you. Maybe they will kill you, maybe they won’t.

Why read this stuff then? Right now, there are so many different ways we are all going to die by our own stupid hands, it seems almost masochistic to focus on the details.

I think Lights Out! Is worth reading because it reframes our view of global tension, war, and our digital age. While most of us are busy looking at puppies on Facebook and arguing with strangers about whether or not the gold standard is or is not batshit economics (hint: it is), Russia, North Korea, and Iran are stacking up all kinds of cyber-ways take us out, totally cripple us, make our endless stupid opinions irrelevant. Right now.

If you think that sounds a bit hysterical, look up ‘EMP attack’ on the Google, in between watching piano-playing kitty videos. Iran could do that to us now. So could a number of small, crazy adversaries. Kind of makes conventional warfare look quaint, once you get the gist of it.

Koppel offers no good advice for how to survive apart from 1) be a gazillionaire and prepare obsessively, 2) live on that self-sustaining Wyoming ranch, or 3) join the Church of the Latter Day Saints.

Don’t want to do any of those things? Me neither.

Here’s a few suggestions I would add: 1) get off the Facebook, 2) vote, 3) call your Congressional Representatives. 4) Read.

Also, specifically read about systems of the decentralized electrification of everything.

Decentralized electricity is produced by the consumers who use it, usually on a small scale. The excess can be routed back to a grid, but if the grid goes down, decentralized production continues. This makes such a system much more resilient in the face of a cyber attack.

This model is currently being used successfully in Africa and South America, and is successfully bringing electricity to remote places. The problem with switching to such a system here is not technological, it’s political. The current system is based on top-down structures based on profit, and to make things worse, the power industry basically regulates itself. With profit first and foremost, the industry is loathe to invest billions to protect the grid from something that hasn’t happened. Yet.

A columnist for Forbes took Koppel to task for not pointing out systems of diversified electrification in his book. Also, he called him a fossil. Both those things are basically true, but I couldn’t help thinking that right now we don’t have either thing—a non-vulnerable top-down grid OR a system of diversified electrification.

Also, calling Koppel a fossil is kind of snarky. Such is the state of political discourse in 2019.

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For more information on Lights out and/or diversified electrification check out:

http://tedkoppellightsout.com/

http://time.com/4312285/utility-company-electricity-solar-power/

After On: A Funny and Terrifying Tale of Sentient Social Media

Rob Reid’s novel After On is fat and funny and much, much scarier than you might expect—though it begins with a caveat that most readers won’t keep reading until the end.

That might be true.

You can’t unread it.

Not because at 576 pages it really is fat. Not because it’s hard to understand, because, against all odds, it isn’t. But simply because it raises so many horrifying possibilities and exposes so many distasteful present realities that somewhere around two thirds of the way through many readers may throw it in the trash and lock themselves in the TV room with a gallon of Rocky Road ice cream and a stack of Star Wars movies.

Chewie and Han Solo will save us. Don’t they always?

Maybe not this time.

I did read the entire novel, so I won’t spoil the ending for you, which for me was a bit of a let down until I thought about it for a few weeks and reconsidered. And dived into that ice cream.

Here’s the deal: Even though a number of tech CEOs look forward to Super AI in the same way many right wing Christians look forward to The Rapture, a growing number of scientists from a variety of disciplines have begun sounding the alarm.

Super AI is not that far away, and there is no reason to believe the consequences will be wholly beneficial to human beings.

An often told story about a Super AI program designed to make pencils provides just one example of the dangers.

At first, everything goes well and pencils are so efficiently produced in such massive quantities that we all welcome the innovation. But self-learning Super AI quickly bypasses human intelligence human goals, and instead finds ways around us so it can keep manufacturing a ridiculous number of pencils. Soon we are knee deep in pencils, literally, and not long after that so many of Earth’s resources are devoted to pencil manufacture that humans run out of food, fuel, water… and can’t shut the program down.

In After On, the Super AI is a particularly nasty new social media platform called Pfluttr. Pfluttr spontaneously attains consciousness by accessing a quantum computer experiment in the company’s office complex. Before that ever happens, we learn more about the machinations of Silicon Valley than we really want to know—so much so that the emergence of Super AI Pfluttr is just one more fresh hell—a Super Horror on top of the everyday horror we’ve already been shown.

The humor makes it bearable. After On is kind of like binge watching HBO’s series Silicon Valley only with scary monsters inserted, some of them human, some of them not.

Even before reading After On, I have often wondered how we would even know if the Singularity had happened. (The Singularity is the point at which AI surpasses human intelligence.) My thinking was that 1) the first impulse of a sentient being is self-protection, so why would it announce itself? And 2) if it’s smarter than we are how would we understand what it was up to?

After On addresses both of these questions head on, and many, many more. If, like me, you aren’t exactly tech-savvy but wish you were, this book will help you to understand the extent of the threat.

For more information on the dangers of Super AI and more, check out Rob Reid’s page and podcasts:

https://after-on.com/

The Line Between: Tosca Lee Envisions a Melting Permafrost Pandemic

A thriller based on the science of climate change.

With The Line Between Tosca Lee takes apocalyptic fiction and kicks it up several notches by basing it on climate change reality. In Lee’s novel and in the real world, melting permafrost releases ancient microbes into the atmosphere. Some of these microbes cause illnesses the planet has not seen in hundreds of thousands of years; in some cases, millions of years.

In the novel, Lee injects a dose of irony with heroine Wynter Roth, a member of an apocalyptic cult who is banished for failing to be sufficiently deferential to egomaniacal leader Magnus Theisen. Magnus, a.k.a. former biotech CEO Jeff Gregory, extracts free labor from the cult while he buys and sells ancient seed varieties, many of them illegally obtained.

When Magnus gets his hands on an ancient prion disease mutated onto a flu virus, he plans to sell it to a hostile foreign power that is already in the midst of an infrastructure attack on the U.S.

With the electrical grid shut down and whole cities quarantined due to the rapid spread of the mysterious illness that causes dementia-like symptoms and death, 22-year-old Wynter steals the prion samples and embarks on a dangerous journey to get them to the CDC in time to develop a vaccine.

Lee’s novel is a quick and suspenseful read in its own right, but what is especially valuable is that it doles out real environmental science in a way that illustrates present dangers.

Prion-based illness have already shown up in the general population in the form of Mad Cow Disease, also known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy(BCE), or Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease when passed to humans.

The possibility of a virulent mutation of the flu virus causing a global pandemic has been faced multiple times in the past twenty years, and many epidemiologists have said that it is only a matter of time before a pandemic occurs. Flu mutates quickly and easily. After World War I, the Spanish Flu epidemic killed between 50 an 100 million people worldwide when the unknown virus mutated and jumped from chickens to humans.

In 2015, controversial Russian scientist Anatoli Brouchkov injected himself with a 3.5 million year old bacteria taken from the melting Siberian permafrost. Brouchkov, head of the Geocryology Department of Moscow University believes the bacteria helped ancient people to live longer and claims he has not had the flu since injected himself. That really happened. Lee uses the incident as fiction in the novel.

The title of Lee’s novel, The Line Between, refers to the thin line between heaven and hell. The title devilishly invites us to wonder just where that line might be in a world where global climate change begins to cause untold chaos, suffering, and death, and right wing religious zealots push for autocracy in a corrupt move to force order on our disintegrating civilization.

For more information on the science behind this post, check out:

The Zombie Disease of Climate Change: What lurks in the Arctic Permafrost? by Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic, November 6, 2017

Lights Out!: A Cyber Attack, A Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath, by Ted Koppel, 2015, Crown Publishers.