fragility of human endeavors…exchanging freedom for reliance on a fragile system

fragility of human endeavors…

Published by

Aubrey Taylor, Editor

on

June 29, 2026

The Cloud. Centralized banking. Mergers of companies under a single umbrella. Moving control of manufacturing plants under the global control of a single entity.

What is marketed as “convenient, safer, more efficient, easier to manage” becomes more complex. When those controls are centralized into a digital framework, it’s much easier to control the employees, goods, services, and monitoring of consumer habits in databases for marketing and merchandising.

But there are caveats to centralization. People and consumers are reduced to numbers instead of individuals. People are not seen as anything but the means of producing more, increasing revenue, and manageability.

Long gone are the shop keepers who knew their customers and knew what their likes and dislikes were. Merchandise was specialized and unique, not purchased in bulk to appease the pocketbooks of the masses. And they were willing to negotiate prices, preserving the dignity of the poor and upholding the wealthy alike.

Now, nothing is personalized. And their data is vulnerable to those who know how to access it.

Is anything secure and private anymore?

Everything now has gone from cash to digital in the short space of about 36 years. In the broader scope of human existence, that is a blink of an eye.

I remember when I worked in the Advertising department of a Big Box store, a Vice President gave a lecture to us all about how rapidly the digital age has risen.

“Look!” she bragged showing a slide with a graph indicating a timeline over the span of about 400 years. “For over 400 years we’ve had nothing but paper and books. But look at us now! Paper will become obsolete and we will be able to track everything using electronic devices. Right now, there are experiments in Uganda where the customer can go in, load up their basket, pass under an archway to leave the store, and all those things in the cart will be automatically rung up deducting the cost from their account¹. Isn’t that amazing? That’s our future!”²

(She would have hated the droll ideas that are now abounding in the arena of minimalism and digital detoxing.)

But it seems that something is missing the mark in that assessment…

I remember when all the paper drafting plans for every store in the world was digitized. I ended up heading the team that had to make the latest store plans to eventually add to a large, cloud based database. All transactions, locations of merchandise, marketing, and restocking were to use those plans. Customers would be able to access the store floorplans to locate merchandise through their app. Customer habits could be traced and evaluated for future products and purchases.

All the paper plans were thrown out.

And, I repeat. Everything was all centralized in one place – a proprietary cloud based system.

It was great!

Until the system crashed. And all the digital drafters were locked out. Not once, but multiple times.

I remember a mantra we used to say back in the early days of programming: Back up your back up with a back up.

They backed everything up, but it still took some doing to get it all back online.

And I wondered about the prudence – or lack of it – when someone puts all their digital eggs in one single basket. Wouldn’t it be vulnerable to the technologically adept weasels who loved the lure of all those digital eggs?

But I was assured that there would be no way to access the data and just kept that question stuck in the back of my mind…

What would happen if the electricity went out, or the data became corrupted, or the computers broke down, or…?

Never put all your eggs in one basket…old school wisdom

Back a few decades ago, there was that old saying of the eggs and the basket. The idea was, if the basket broke or fell, all that you so carefully gathered would be lost and broken. Unusable to eat, and unusable to scrape back together to even give to the animals for food.

But in our society today, we seem to have lost sight of that simple mantra. What was once separated by physical location was now put into a single resource on a cloud based computer somewhere – or several somewheres, as it’s not a single server that operates in the “cloud”. No one seems to know the “where” of all that data – just the login portal to access it.

If something were to break, like a glitch in the program³, or a satellite the cloud based system was linked to⁴ suddenly goes out of orbit⁵ – or is damaged and no longer functional – the entire system is unavailable and there no longer exists a physical backup of that data.

I always love the retort that the younger generation gives (and, unfortunately, many of the older people who should know better): “That will never happen. There are always ways around it, and backups.”

But it has happened in the past, like when the satellite that was responsible for transmitting data to Blackberries and register transactions to and from the credit card systems was knocked out of orbit⁶. For retail stores where customers didn’t have cash on hand, some places, like the one I used to work at, still had those old-school charge card machines that used duplicate paper forms. But those are pretty much a thing of the past now—along with the raised print on the cards that used to transfer info to the paper slips.

Or when the jail system was hacked and the prisoners were locked in their cells, and all their records disappeared⁷.There were paper backups for a lot of that and physical keys as well, but now that, too, is long gone.

I use a phone company that runs on an app. You can’t find them or access them in a physical location. You can’t even call them or access anything to do with your account if you don’t go through the app.

This morning, it wouldn’t log me in. Not on any device. Not through the app or any website browser (and I have three). I needed to change the payment method, but I couldn’t get in to fix that. Instead of being able to simply pick up a phone and call for a human to help me, I was stuck.

I was able to resolve the conundrum in the end, but not without exposing my entire digital world to the glorious universe of unseen hackers by turning off my precious VPN…

So is this really making our lives easier?

In a word, when it all works, perhaps. But in the end, especially when it doesn’t, you decide.

Keeping up with the news requires a digital connection. Finding recipes or catching up with friends require apps and digital connections. Listening to music once accessible with physical records is now all digital. Photography, cooking, even doing laundry is all handled with microprocessors and computer firmware. Driving in cars built after the 1990’s all have computers in them. When a sensor goes out, so does your world.

So the question I have for each of you is this: What are you doing to simplify your complex world? Do you get together with your friends face-to-face and actually talk with each other, or are all of you, when you meet, on a phone typing away to someone else while carrying on a conversation with a human being in front of you? Do you know how to balance your transactions and balance a physical register, or do you depend on whatever you have left in your account to be your balance? Do you even have a budget? If so, how to do you monitor your spending habits? Physically on paper, or dependent on yet another app? What if your Venmo doesn’t work, or you are locked out of your digital accounts? Do you have any payment options if the power went out?

Can you even carry on a conversation with a stranger or go to any location without having your cell phone with you? Could you exist in a world that isn’t digitally connected? As many people in first world countries have experienced, electric vehicles can’t be charged, cell phones don’t work, they can’t access gas, and can’t buy anything when the electrical grid goes down during or after storms, fires, or sometimes even a major solar flare as happened in 1989⁸.

We are one solar flare, one EMP away from total digital collapse. It’s a fragile tower we’ve built for ourselves.

We are one generation away from losing all our skills of our forefathers who lived without electricity. The Amish can only teach so much to a generation that doesn’t even know how to cook food without a microwave.

And my reply to the Vice President’s slide show was,

“What goes up that fast, falls just as fast.”

Think about it. And let me hear your comments.