Unplugging isn’t easy now, and by 2026 it will be even tougher
pewresearch.org
pewresearch.org
"A share of these respondents noted that as businesses, governments and other organizations begin to reap benefits from the IoT, people will be rewarded for their use and suffer consequences for nonparticipation."
"Resistance is futile: Businesses will penalize those who disconnect; social processes reward those who connect. Fully withdrawing is extremely difficult, maybe impossible."
Dan Geer on this topic[1]:
> The most telling fork in the road of them all is whether we retain an ability to operate our world, or at least the parts we would call critical, by analog means. Analog means, and only analog means, do not share a common mode failure with the digital world at large. But to preserve analog means requires that they be used, not left to gather dust on some societal shelf in the hope than when they are needed they will work. This requires a base load, a body of use and users that keep the analog working. [...]
> What we have here is an historic anomaly, an anomaly where the most readily available counter to an otherwise inexorable drift into a vortex of singleton technology risk and the preservation of a spectrum of non-trivial civil rights is one and the same counter: the guarantee, by force of law where necessary, that those who choose to not participate in the digital melange can nevertheless fully enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that to opt out of the digital vortex does not thereby require that they live in medieval conditions, and, by doing so, we reap a national security benefit in the bargain as those opting out are the base load for the analog alternative. [...]
> And that is what I am here to tell you, that the future of humanity and cybersecurity are conjoined, so that as we prepare to make some decisions that are of the fork-in-the-road sort, we need to think it through because in making decisions about cybersecurity we are choosing amongst possible futures for humanity. Those decisions will be expensive to later reverse in either dollars or clock-ticks.
> The onrushing world of full personalization means the rational decision for the individual or the small entity does not and will not aggregate into the rational decision for society at large. Perhaps that is the core effect from a rate of change up with which we cannot keep. [...]
> You, we, are the masters of the universe now. What will we do with that power, which we have but a short while more?
[1] video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbDEbfijxNY text: http://geer.tinho.net/geer.ncc.8x18.txt