The thing about cyber and conflict…

Insecurity is implicit to – and irreducible in – technology. There is absolutely no way to guarantee complete and permanent closure of *any* communications system because the indefinitely-extensible logical and material basis of accelerating technological innovation is simultaneously the proliferation of increased probabilities of vulnerability and critical incidents.

While there is something of a booming industry around the production of software and systems intended for monitoring and protection of critical corporate and government systems, there is no silver bullet and all people (everywhere), all organisations, institutions and all governments (of all countries) are much more vulnerable than anyone in positions of influence or authority seems willing to openly or maturely discuss.

If we were to seek some ground truth here it might be that – just as with nuclear weapons – humanity’s aptitude to negotiate core psychological and existential issues of identity and difference has been utterly left behind by the hyper-inflating complexity of our own distributed cleverness.

It is not all that difficult – conflict and war is the atavism here, the anachronistic baggage we collectively carry and that has so profoundly infused and shaped our collective sense of self-identity (as a function of difference) that we are all conditioned into believing that adversarial competition is quite normal.

We never would have survived very long if we had not been foundationally competitive but a fact that is not being addressed is that we do not actually require this conflict any more and it is only those who ideologically, politically and economically benefit from this weeping, open wound that seek its persistence.