On Security: Part I
As a cybersecurity professional, I spend a good part of every day thinking about security problems. For my group, the main challenge is getting public organizations in the US to adopt, at minimum, an effective set of cybersecurity services - ones we develop the requirements for and, in some cases, provide directly. America’s infrastructure, public and private, is under immense threat, and the security baseline is generally too low. I tend to be a big-picture thinker who takes a holistic view of things, and a line of thought I had earlier this week captures that: what is the one master security problem - the security problem to rule them all, as it were? Not just for us at CISA, or even just Americans, but for any humans. It was one of those thoughts that surfaces when you’re about to fall asleep, or standing in a long, steamy shower letting your mind wander. We currently face the promise of rapid technological transformation amid unprecedented uncertainty, tension, and risk. Put succinctly, ensuring a baseline quality of human survivability may be the greatest security problem we face - how do we survive without losing everything? It’s been a fun rabbit hole to go down, because it lets me exercise a muscle I don’t often use: writing an essay, something I did constantly back when I was a history student (dusting off my gigantic orange hard copy of the Chicago Manual of Style).
When I talk about transformation through crisis, I mean big, well-known pivotal events - some sudden, some a longer process: the collapse of the Roman Empire and the rise of the feudal system in Europe; the Black Death and the feudal system’s collapse that gave way to the Renaissance and early modern Europe. In the American context, there’s the Civil War’s answer to the foundational question of slavery and sectionalism, or the Great Depression and the New Deal that followed, which dramatically reordered the economy and society. Today, the world faces multiple converging threats: climate change; nuclear weapons (the Doomsday Clock currently sits at 89 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been, and just this past week Donald Trump positioned ballistic missile submarines closer to Russian territory while Dmitry Medvedev bragged about Russia’s Dead Hand strategic weapons system1); pandemics; systemic economic fragility; rapidly advancing AI; and the increasingly viable prospect that humans may soon live not just on Earth, but out in the cosmos. Add to this that most people are overconsuming media - some of it accurate and good-faith, some of it twisted to inflict maximum fear and stress - on devices that are ubiquitous and always within reach, and it’s no wonder people feel a looming sense of doom. The potential for disruption, destruction, transformation, and lightning-fast change all seem present in equal and unprecedented measure - so unprecedented that we may be standing at the highest-stakes precipice in our history, an inflection point that could spell disaster or triumph.
I’m not trying to give any of those converging threats exhaustive treatment here. Instead, I’m interested in how we should view the two-edged sword of destruction and transformation as it relates to our present, rapidly changing situation and what comes next. Great disruption, whether by catastrophe or innovation (or both), can catalyze societal evolution if approached with readiness and ethical caution. But paramount above all is ensuring a sufficient quality of survivability - functional survival, regardless of what happens. It is therefore one of the greatest, if not the greatest, security concern we have, one on which all others depend. Should we face catastrophe, I could see the question playing out like a scene from Foundation, in which Hari Seldon tells the leaders of the Empire on Trantor (or the personified “Empire,” for those who watched the TV series) that how they respond to inevitable decline will determine just how long the dark ages last - a thousand years, or thirty times longer? Our deliberate choices, and how we leverage our technological prowess, may dictate what the aftermath looks like, assuming our technological capacity and the knowledge behind it survive the process.
In the next post (or update to this post) I will explore how scholars and tech people have thought about this question.
“How the US is Preparing for the Next Pandemic,” BBC News, August 14, 2025, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly4kgv9238o. ↩︎