It occurred to me the other day, that this can be easy, I’d taped a movie to watch the next day, and also begun reading a book. The combination had me with, once I’d finished both, an uneasy feeling at the back of my neck. The movie was Die Hard 4.0 in which Bruce Willis is told to collect a possible computer hacker and bring him to FBI H.Q. He’s no sooner reached the young man than a professional hit team appears targeting the kid, and all hell breaks loose in normal Die Hard style. But the real kicker is the plot, in which it’s demonstrated that if you’re sufficiently computer-savvy, you can cause incredible mayhem in every aspect of the life of a country’s citizens. You can switch every traffic light to green, producing multiple pileups with many dead and injured people. Power goes off all over the country, cue old people dying of hyperthermia etc. Gas backflow in pipelines causes flash fires. And there is huge panic in stock exchanges as all stocks apparently nosedive. New Zealand may not be so reliant as the USA on centralized computerized utilities, but I wonder how long it will be before we are, and if once that happens then if we won’t have some stupid computer-very-literate, but lacking-in-any-common-sense kid, seeing if they can do this sort of thing, just for the fun of it and without emotionally comprehending the consequences?
And before and after this time, I was also reading Orson Scott Card’s novel, Empire. Now that’s a book also likely to give some of my American friends nightmares, and it didn’t do a lot for my peace of mind either. It explains how a second American civil war could be sparked by a small group. It follows a soldier involved in special ops, a decent moral guy, happily married with a number of kids, and a very smart wife, but who finds that he may have contributed to the civil war that’s begun. Loosely it’s a war of the liberal left, against the conservative right, and Card has a number of points to make, and which are made very well about how this scenario is all too possible. That it may not happen exactly this way, but unless both sides shut their fanatics UP sometime soon, it could come about, and that killing moderates on either side is a good start for a war. The scenario used is all too possible and again it left me with an uneasy feeling at the back of my neck. No, New Zealand isn’t anywhere near that level of vitriol or polarization as yet and I don’t think it will be in my lifetime, but I’d rather it didn’t happen here at all or in American for that matter. I guess that reading the book, and watching the movie in the middle of it, reinforced each other, but I’m currently thinking about adding a few more cutouts for farm utilities. I do have several backup systems already in case of quakes, but maybe I should consider future computer-hacking and expand those. If or when it happens it”ll be too late to wish I’d done so earlier. See what I mean about paranoia?