Ready to Stand Alone in the Lord?

Ironic note: I had a bit of struggle getting a valid response from the website where this article was hosted — an article about the Internet being seriously crippled by bad guys. In this article, Brandon Smith tells us of yet another coming woe. He attempts to draw a picture of economic activity badly hampered by a large-scale breakdown of the Internet.

Then he attempts to point out how easily TPTB could get their minions to generate such an event. He associates it with yesterday’s Cyberpolygon war-gaming scenario hosted by the Word Economic Forum (WEF). Keep in mind that major hassles came out of the WEF’s previous war-games. The COVID plague was war-gamed by the WEF two months before it was declared officially. Thus, Smith suggests that, in the next month or two, we could see unprecedented disruptions of Internet access and traffic.

Well, people who spend a lot of time studying how the Net works have been warning for years how fragile it all is. The level of interdependence is beyond comprehension, and every bit of it seems to be absolutely essential. You’d have to spend a lot of time looking into it to realize that the vast majority of what makes the Internet possible involves thousands of commercial operations you never hear about. Internet technology is really quite arcane, and its resilience has long been compromised by all the efforts to pass off the grunt work to willing third parties.

Two things come to mind about all this. One is that we should all strive to DIY anything that matters to us. Notice I said “strive” — it’s not a dire necessity, just something you should consider. And it’s not just the Internet, but a million other things we do in our daily lives. Discern those things for which you know something useful, and then identify those things for which you are utterly dependent on God to provide.

The second is related: You should be ready to stand alone. If the Net goes down for any extended time, it’s going to be very hard for us to keep our little virtual community alive. I’ve been warning about that possibility for a long time. The point was that you should search your heart to ensure you have absorbed as much faith teaching as you can use, with the awareness that we are working toward the day when we will be cut off from each other.

It’s not the destruction of a community; it’s the dispersion of a divine influence. If all your focus is inward on the community, you’ll struggle to keep faith alive when that community dissolves, regardless of why it happens. Our whole emphasis for quite some time has been to make you independent, even as we strive to make the most of our fellowship while we have it. So let me push that one more time: Don’t let your faith depend on me or anyone else.

I can’t estimate how much an Internet disruption could affect the use of cellphones. That’s why I’ve encouraged all of us to exchange phone numbers (mine — 405-503-1692, voice or text). Unlike Smith, I have neither the interest nor funding to get into HAM and Packet Internet communications. Besides, my experience has been that such is even more vulnerable to disruptions (I learned that in the military).

So what’s left is the one consideration that TPTB themselves rely on the Internet, and it’s virtually impossible that they would have built up an alternative means of networking. Their vulnerability is our safety factor. I find it odd that a major portion of these people know so little about the Internet in the first place. Most of them are far more dependent on third party expertise than is average for our little community. Probabilities are high that, whatever it is they preserve for themselves will work for us.

These are just some things to consider in the coming days.