Stranger Than We Can Imagine (37 page)

In the twentieth century, ‘My Way’ sounded glorious. It was a song frequently played at funerals to celebrate a life well lived. But by the twenty-first century, had it started to sound a little tragic?

The live media coverage of that event was not just a story of celebration and drunk people in fountains. Another story was unfolding at the same time, regarding something called the Millennium Bug. There was concern about how computer systems would deal with the date change.

When the earliest computers were built, computer memory was extremely expensive, so programmers employed neat little tricks to
use the memory they had more efficiently. One such fudge involved not using the full four digits of a year, such as ‘1963’, but instead just storing the last two digits, ‘63’, and assuming that the year referred to the twentieth century. As computers developed over the 1970s and 1980s the cost of two storage bits became negligible, and tricks like this became unnecessary. But newer computing systems often had the legacy of older hardware and software in their DNA, and buried deep within the core code of many important systems was the assumption that after 1999 would come the year 1900.

Quite how significant this problem was was hard to tell. Computers had come from nowhere and, over the course of a couple of decades, they had taken over the running of pretty much everything. No one knew for sure exactly what the impact of the Millennium Bug would be. One potential scenario was doomsday. Planes would fall from the sky, the entire global financial system would cease to function, nuclear power stations would go into meltdown and mankind would be thrown back to the Stone Age. Another scenario was that nothing much would happen and the whole thing was a scam by programmers who wanted to up their overtime payments. Such a broad range of speculation was immensely attractive to the news media, who quickly rechristened the problem the ‘Y2K Bug’, on the grounds that it sounded more computery.

As a result of the concern, governments and companies spent a great deal of money updating their computer systems ahead of time, with some estimates placing the total cost as high as $600 million. When the year 2000 arrived without any significant problems there was great relief, and a nagging suspicion that the overtime-rich computer engineers had pulled a fast one.

What the Y2K Bug did do was force people to confront the extent to which they had become dependent on computers. The shift from a pre-digital to a post-digital society had been swift and total, and few people really noticed that it was happening until it was too late. There had been no time, therefore, to think through the most significant aspects of that revolution: all those computers were connected.

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In the early twentieth century young children such as Wernher von Braun, Jack Parsons and Sergei Korolev had been shaped by the heroic, individualist science fiction of the age. Raised on Flash Gordon and Jules Verne, they dreamt of journeying into space and they dedicated their lives to realising that dream. The task was difficult, and only achieved through the catalyst of global war. The space rocket was born alongside its twin, the intercontinental nuclear missile. This had geopolitical consequences.

Before Hiroshima, the political and military game had been akin to chess. The king stayed at the back of the battlefield, as far away from the conflict as possible. To win the game it was necessary to take the opposing king, and all the other chess pieces were dedicated to making sure that this did not happen. Once the king was lost, the game was over. It was not necessary to completely wipe out your opponent in order to win, only to behead their master.

In the Cold War, different rules applied. The king could be taken immediately, during the first move of the game. It did not matter how far away from the frontline they hid because nuclear warheads were attached to rockets powerful enough to reach anywhere on the globe. It was just as easy to wipe out the White House or Red Square as it was to wipe out anywhere else. The game could be lost with entire armies still intact.

A rethink of the hierarchical power structure was called for. Previously, the king or tsar issued orders, which were passed down the chain of command. Their subjects carried out those orders and reported on their progress. That information was passed up the chain of command. Information could flow up or it could flow down, but it didn’t do anything else.

In the new circumstances of the Cold War, the US military searched for a way to remain operative even if their command centre had been nuked and they were effectively headless. The answer was to ditch the hierarchical structure and design their information systems as a network. Every part of it should be able to contact every other part. Information needed to move from one part of the
structure to another, and if the infrastructure along that route had been vaporised under a mushroom cloud, then that information should be able to find a different route to its destination.

In 1958, as a direct response to Sputnik, the US founded an agency within the US Department of Defense known as the Advanced Research Project Agency, or ARPA. In the 1960s ARPA began working on a computer network called ARPANET. It had not originally been designed specifically to remain operative in the event of a nuclear strike, but as the years progressed people came to think of it in those terms.

The ARPANET worked by parcelling up the information that had to flow between separate computers into standardised chunks known as ‘packets’. Each packet was marked with its intended destination, but the route it took to get there was decided along the way and was dependent on the amount of traffic it encountered. A message from Los Angeles to San Francisco, for example, would be split into a number of packets that would set off across the network together, but they might not all take the same route to their destination. It was like a convoy of vehicles which got separated at busy traffic junctions, but which were still all able to make their own way to where they were going. When all the packets arrived in San Francisco they were recombined into the original message. When the speed of information flow was measured in milliseconds it did not matter if part of that data had come via the far side of the continent while the rest had taken a more direct route.

In the eyes of the ARPANET, geography was irrelevant. What mattered was that every node in the network was reachable from everywhere else. ARPA studied problems such as network efficiency and packets that got lost en route, and in time the ARPANET evolved into the internet we know today.

In the 1990s the internet reached beyond military and educational institutions and arrived in people’s homes. A key factor in this was the 1995 release of Microsoft’s Windows 95 operating system, which drove the growth of PC sales beyond the business world. Windows
95 was the first time that a software release was a major news story outside the specialist technology press. It arrived with great hype and a hugely expensive advertising campaign soundtracked by The Rolling Stones. Windows 95 was far friendlier than its predecessor, Windows 3.1, and did not require the same degree of specialist knowledge to use. It was also much better at running games.

What came next occurred so fast that most people didn’t realise what had happened until years later. In the three years between the arrival of Windows 95 and the release of its successor, Windows 98, almost every aspect of the contemporary internet arrived in the mainstream. It may have been in embryonic form, but it was all there.

There was email, and a form of instant messaging known as IRC. There were webpages written in HTML, and web browsers with which to view them. There were communities to provide discussion forums, and there was music available in the form of mp3s if you knew where to look. There was a considerable amount of porn, as you might expect, and the first online shops. A few people began to put their diaries online, which seemed shocking in the context of twentieth-century ideas of privacy. These grew into the blogs we know today. Audio was first streamed in real time across the internet in 1995, thanks to software called RealAudio, and video followed in 1997. Interactive animation appeared online following the development of FutureSplash Animator, which later evolved into Adobe Flash.

To modern eyes, the internet of the 1990s would seem incredibly slow and unsophisticated. Yet at the point we entered the new millennium, all the concepts behind our current technology were already in place. We just didn’t know what their impact would be.

The fact that everything became connected, potentially, to everything else, changed the way information flowed through our society. It was no longer the case that reports had to be passed upwards while orders were passed down. Every member of the network was free to do what they wished with the information that flowed their way. The result was an unexpected wave of transparency,
which has washed over all our institutions and cast light on the secrets hidden within their structures.

In Britain, that process began in earnest with the MPs’ expenses scandal. A culture of fraudulent expense claims had long been considered normal among British Members of Parliament, with MPs claiming taxpayers’ money for everything from moat-clearing at country estates to a £1,645 house for ducks. This was exposed in 2009 and became a major scandal, with a number of politicians from both the Houses of Lords and Commons being either suspended, forced to resign, or prosecuted under criminal charges. Although much of the corruption was petty by historic standards, the scandal symbolised the growing distrust of authority and the public’s desire for accountability. At the time, the story appeared to be simply good journalism by the
Daily Telegraph
newspaper, making use of the Freedom of Information Act. It soon proved to be the start of something far bigger.

The coming wave of transparency hit every institution in society. Corruption was uncovered in police forces. South Yorkshire Police, for example, were revealed to have altered numerous witness statements in a cover-up surrounding the deaths of ninety-six people at the Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield in 1989, and to have fabricated evidence against ninety-five striking miners for political reasons in 1984. South Yorkshire Police looked like a model of probity compared to London’s Metropolitan Police Force, who instructed undercover spies to ‘smear’ the family of the murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence and who regularly accepted bribes from journalists. The Fleet Street hacking scandal revealed the institutional level of corruption in British newspapers, most notably those owned by News International. Rebekah Brooks, the editor of the
Sun
, was charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. She was eventually cleared, but it was still a shock to see such a powerful figure tried in court. Decades-old paedophile scandals suddenly came to light, most notably that of the late television personality Jimmy Savile. Savile’s decades of child and sexual abuse prompted a major police investigation that revealed abuse by many well-known
entertainment and establishment figures and the extent to which this was hushed up by institutions where the abuse took place, including the BBC and children’s hospitals.

The public exposure of institutionalised corruption was not just a British phenomenon. The Catholic Church was revealed to be covering up child abuse within its ranks on a frankly unimaginable scale. Fraud was rampant in the banking world, as shown by the casual way bankers regarded the illegal rigging of an interest rate known as LIBOR for their own profits. There have been calls for transparency concerning everything, from corporate tax strategies, to the results of clinical trials, to the governance of international football.

In 2006 the website Wikileaks was founded. It revealed illegal activities in areas ranging from Peruvian oil to Swiss banking before causing a global political firestorm with the release of US war logs and diplomatic cables. The fact that no institution was safe from the sudden wave of transparency was evident when the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden released up to 1.7 million classified security documents, revealing the extent to which the NSA and GCHQ were operating without proper legal oversight and, essentially, spying on everyone. Snowden, like Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, was the product of a network culture in which the very fact that government secrets existed was reason enough to demand their exposure. Like the parliamentary expenses scandal, the establishment’s desire to cover up the story was as damaging as the details that were leaked. By the time the constant outpouring of twenty-first-century institutional scandals had reached that most secretive of worlds, the security services, it was clear that something significant was occurring.

The reason for this wave of transparency was the arrival of the network. Previously, if an allegation had been made against Jimmy Savile, for example, that allegation was a lone piece of data which created cognitive dissonance with his fame and career. Even though there had always been rumours about Savile, a single allegation did not appear plausible to the eyes of the relevant authorities. It would
not be properly investigated, not least because of his charity work and perceived power. But in the networked age, anyone who took an interest in such a lone piece of data could use the search algorithms of Google to discover other, previously isolated, pieces of data. When it was known that one child has made an allegation against Savile, it was easy to dismiss that as false. But when it was known that hundreds of different, unconnected children had made strikingly similar allegations, then the situation suddenly looked very different. Previously, victims did not come forward because they did not think that they would be believed. That they were willing to come forward in this network culture indicates that they recognised something had changed.

These investigations no longer needed to originate with professional journalists or regulatory bodies. Anyone with an interest or a grudge could start to collate all those separate claims. They could also connect to other concerned citizens who had stories to tell. Websites like the Everyday Sexism Project, which catalogues behaviour towards women on a day-to-day basis, showed how separate, often disregarded incidents were part of a serious, significant pattern.