Between computer-crashing worms and blackouts, a week like the one just past can make a person acutely aware of his dependence on technology.
Joe Tolerico, a computer programmer in Manhattan, caught it on both fronts.
Early last week, he cleaned his girlfriend Abby's computer of the MSBlaster worm that has attacked more than 330,000 PCs worldwide. On Thursday, he found himself in an office building in Queens when the power went out.
Tolerico made his way back to his Tribeca apartment, just blocks from the former site of the World Trade Center's twin towers. On Friday morning, he was sitting in his apartment weathering 92-degree heat, pigging out on food in his refrigerator lest it go bad and thinking of the best use of his remaining $6 in cash. His girlfriend had skipped town for a trip with the $100 in singles he's kept around as an emergency fund since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
All told, Tolerico was cheerfully making the best of it -- and cataloging a list of equipment that, without juice, mostly wasn't working.
"I work in the tech industry, so I use a laptop, I have a Linux server at home, and I have two PCs and three Macs at home as well," Tolerico said. "I have cell phones, Walkmen, digital cable with video on demand. Here in Manhattan we can only make local calls on land lines, and my cell phone is only working sporadically."
The Blaster worm failed to affect Craig Thomas, another New Yorker in the tech industry. Thomas, who sets up information technology systems for cable and broadcast companies, doesn't use Microsoft products. Unlike his in-laws, he's also learned better than to be completely dependent on what he calls "coupled" technologies -- such as electric-powered cordless telephones.
Still, he had a hard time calming down his 2-year-old daughter, Nancy, who became upset when the lights wouldn't go on when she flicked the switch.
"Last night she wanted to watch Bob the Builder, and I had three hours of battery power on my laptop," Thomas said. "She was happy -- although she didn't understand why the TV wouldn't work."
What seemed like minor annoyances to hardy types like Thomas and Tolerico were more substantial problems for many of the tens of millions affected when power failed across the northeastern United States and Canada -- not to mention the legions of hapless PC users crippled by the Blaster worm. In cities such as Cleveland, for instance, the power failure cascaded into water shortages and a collapse of transportation systems.
Experts agreed that the two episodes -- while unrelated -- offered a cautionary tale about the role of technology in our lives. The incidents laid bare the brittleness of increasingly complex, interconnected systems, leading some to question their near-total dependence on them.
"When things like this happen at the same time, we realize that we're living in a world that's wired and creative, but that doesn't make it any more predictable or understandable," said Rosalind Williams, director of MIT's Program in Science, Society and Technology. "We've created a second nature, and it still feels as mysterious and out of control as the God-given and nature-given creation. That makes us uneasy."
Certainly the Blaster worm has been more than a minor annoyance for Cedric Bennett, Stanford University's director of information security services.
Bennett spent much of the week overseeing the cleaning of 2,400 PCs -- nearly 10 percent of all those on the school's campus -- of the worm, as well as fending off other, less-publicized attacks on the same weakness in Microsoft operating systems.
The incident gave Bennett a chance to witness what happens when people who have become accustomed -- if not addicted -- to their PCs are deprived of them.
"Somebody recently did a study that sort of tested what happens to people in day-to-day business if their e-mail goes away," Bennett said, speaking more broadly of our increasing reliance on technology. "It was socially phenomenal. After less than a day, they were getting irritable and couldn't deal with other people -- it was like losing an appendage. If it lasted more than a day, they would start to yell at each other."
In the MSBlaster attack, hackers were bent on staging the denial-of-service attack from hell on the Microsoft site that in turn provides patches for operating systems. Meanwhile, officials still are trying to figure out the exact cause of the huge East Coast power failure, although they seem to have ruled out deliberate sabotage (including any implication of the Blaster worm).
Observers such as Bennett, MIT's Williams and Steven Koonin, a theoretical physicist and provost at Caltech, agree the past week's events will reenergize the post-Sept. 11 discussion over protecting critical infrastructures -- electricity, water, transportation and the Internet -- against a natural disaster, critical failure or terrorist attack.
But Koonin in particular noted that such discussions involve players from a variety of levels of government and different agencies, not to mention the private sector and even foreign countries. Winning agreement on necessary changes and expenditures is tough.
"Technology is wonderful and lets us do many things faster, and one of the things it does is to decentralize society by letting us connect in different places rapidly, such as in communications or transportation," Koonin said. "It also makes us much more vulnerable to what happens across the whole world. If a lightning bolt hits Niagara Falls or northern Ohio or a tie-line in Northern California, a lot more people can be broadly affected."
Williams also warns against the danger of having our tech-obsessed society think of meeting such self-created challenges only in terms of technical solutions.
"I'm not questioning our commitment to technology, the Internet and electricity," Williams said. "But there is questioning that is done individually that maybe we should cut back on this or that. Why should it be only the individual's role to find a better balance?"
At the end of the day, the past week may serve as a reminder that the systems humans create are like nature -- they're complex, unstable and unpredictable. Add to that the fact that they're susceptible to human error and malicious actions.
But incidents such as these are also an indication that when technology is stripped away, what remains is the ineffable essence that makes people human -- and that technology is never an end in itself.
"The power thing is nothing," said New Yorker Tolerico. "I can't go to work, I can't write programming, but what's important in life? It's family, relationships, humans."
