Why Another Dark Age Is Possible, Part I

Part I:  The Vulnerability of High-Tech

This is a two-part series about why another dark age is possible.  Inevitable?  Not necessarily.  But possible, and definitely not out of question, particularly if the bear market underway (and notwithstanding the last couple of weeks, it is still underway) is of anything higher than Grand Supercycle degree - which, as I have previously discussed, is not out of the question.  (Also, it's worth pointing out that if it's G.S. [V] that topped, Prechter's ultra-long-term count, which is predicated on this being G.S. [III] that topped, is incorrect, and who knows what other fifth waves it could be the top of....)

Here in this Information Age, it seems ludicrous to suggest that we could ever regress technologically.  After all, virtually every bit of knowledge ever amassed has been put on the Internet in some form, and likely mirrored several times.  Need to smelt a lot of iron into steel?  It's not like we're going to un-discover the Bessemer process, which you can read all about on Wikipedia.  Need to learn how to grow tomatoes?  Google has plenty of results on that topic.  Expecting a cold winter and need to find out cheap ways to stay warm?  Yep, the Internet has that too.

The Internet has become so ubiquitous that we hardly even remember how to live without it.  Among the youngest generations, it has become internalized.  It's everywhere.  You can't avoid it.  If you're reading this, by definition you have access to it - or someone you know has access to it.  You probably do your banking online.  Many of my readers actively trade the stock market - how many of them actually go call a broker every time they want to make a daytrade?

But there's something a lot of people forget about the Internet, and that is that it costs money to use it.


Oh, certainly, it may not cost you any money to use it, especially directly - you might not have to pay a monthly bill to an ISP.  Maybe you only go online at work, or at school, or at Starbucks, or on a mobile device.  Maybe you live in a city with public wi-fi.  Maybe you bum off your neighbor's unsecured Linksys connection (in which case, shame on you).  But someone pays an ISP for access - your employer, university, neighbor, or landlord, the city, Starbucks, whatever.  If you're on a phone, the Internet service is part of your phone bill.

The point is that it costs money.  And moreover, virtually everything that has Internet access consumes electricity, which also costs money.  Granted, a laptop uses far less energy than a typical air conditioning or heating unit, but even so, you are using electricity to run whatever it is you're getting Internet off of.  (If it's battery-powered, like a mobile phone, you're still using electricity that will eventually have to be paid for by someone.  That battery will have to be charged at some point.)

Obviously, if a massive deflationary depression as predicted by Prechter inter alia comes to pass, money will be tight.  And given the choice between food or Facebook, my guess is most people would choose food.

More to the point, however, is the fact that electricity is not 100% reliable.  Rolling brownouts may occur in the event of nothing more than people using more than the power company can supply at the time.  Power can go out for an hour or so on account of things as common as lightning strikes.  Should a more significant weather event occur - say, a hurricane or an ice storm - it could go out for days or even weeks.

In other words, the steady supply of electricity is dependent on the power grid not being disrupted.  The reason the power sometimes goes out during severe weather is generally that a power line, transformer, etc. has been damaged.  Electricity supply depends on very physical systems, which are susceptible to damage by, among other things, acts of nature.  It's partly for this reason that places that really, really need to make sure the electricity's on 24/7 no matter what (e.g. hospitals) make use of generators.

No electricity, no Internet.

Furthermore, we have this tendency to think of the Internet as a place:  We "go" online and "visit" web-"sites".  This is not entirely accurate.  The Internet is first and foremost a network of computers - hence the term Internet.  Your computer connects to another computer somewhere (typically a server), and your browser downloads and interprets the webpage you wanted to see, which is stored on that computer.

The key word here is "stored".  Every bit of data has some physical manifestation somewhere in the real world.  If you save a file to your computer's hard drive, the data contained within that file is, of course, on your hard drive, which is a physical device located inside your computer.  You could, theoretically, remove your hard drive and put it in some other computer, and you could access your file perfectly fine (this is the principle behind external hard drives).

If you store your file "in the cloud" - say, on Google Docs or something like that - what that really means is that it's stored on some remote host server.  But there is still a physical location of that file on that server.  The same applies to literally everything on the Internet, including this very blog post.  If something happens to Blogger's servers, or if they lose access to electricity, this post will become inaccessible.  (It will still exist, unless the actual data gets corrupted in some way, but it will be inaccessible.)

So now it's not just your own Internet/electricity access you have to worry about, but that on the server side as well.  Oh, well, if all else fails, we still have books and libraries to fall back on, right?  Well, about that... you'll have to wait for part II.