The Post-Modern Legacy?

We live in an increasingly global world.  It used to be that we didn't know what was happening in another country until the letters finally reached our mailboxes.  Not only that, we live in an increasingly technology driven world, such that those letters have finally been turned into instantaneous emails, news reports, and blog postings, all pushed to our smart phones, tablets, and laptops whenever we feel like checking.  This new way of living has both its positives, but also its negatives, though.  Similarly, we live in a world where the Apple iPhone might be designed in America but its manufactured in another country altogether.  More So, when we have trouble working our iPhones, we end up calling tech support and in most cases, those people aren't answering our phone calls from the same country.  The question we have to ask is, have we bettered our way of living or have we worsened it?  

Another issue that we face as a society is that of money.  Everything seems to be driven by money rather than for the better good of society.  Schools all take federal funding but they vehemently discriminate against students who have learning disabilities because those of us who have LD's just happen to learn differently but are considered to have a mental illness.  Simply put, the majority of society is still ignorant even with a smartphone in their pockets.  It would seem that even though we have made advancements as a society, we have begun to generate a more segregated society, where its no longer just class boundaries or wealth, but also our IQ levels.  In other words, society still works on more subtle principles of slavery, they just come in the form of burger flippers and gas station attendants.  

To continue on a similar theme from another blog posting, our increasing reliance on technology is growing to become a ticking time bomb similar to the scale we faced during the attack on Pearl Harbor.  We put everything on the internet that shouldn't even be connected to the internet unless it has a secure connection.  In addition, we don't upgrade what needs to be upgraded and end up with extremely vulnerable computer systems connected to the internet.  Our inability to recognize the risks is leaving our entire country vulnerable to attacks that could render our financial system, air traffic control system, and multiple other systems useless.  

If we are going to consider this current era we live in as a post-modern era, than one is to assume that we have already advanced to a place where risks on the internet have been mitigated.  Similarly, we would be a society that understands that all students deserve and innately possess the right to an education.  Let's ensure that what is written about our era speaks for the values of our country and not simply to the value of a dollar or a small subset of society.  

A New Cold War?

In chapter 22, Strayer discusses the world impact of Communism.  From it's simple beginnings to its underpinning as the foundation of nations, Communism has ultimately written many pages of what we know as history.  One of the more historically important aspects of Communism, however, is that of the nuclear arms race, primarily existing between the United States and Russia.  Historically, the United States was able to secure the majority of V2 Nazi rocket scientists at the end of World War II while Russia managed to only return a handful of scientists who had worked on the V2 program.  The importance of this event is indicative of a race that happened in parallel to the nuclear arms race -- the space race.  The space race has just the same historical importance as the nuclear arms race in that it was for national pride.  John F. Kennedy himself publicly stated that in ten years time, the United States would land man on the moon, and on that fateful day in 1969 Apollo 11 landed the first humans on the moon.

And while the space race is a rather historical legacy of the war between Democracy and Communism, it would seem as though the Cold War never really ended.  While, one might consider the fall of the Berlin Wall as an ending of the Soviet Union, and it in essence was, one could still say that the Cold War is in full effect and might even be heating up.  There is evidence of this in the fact that China, a Communist nation, has been taking the place of Russia as the adversary of  the United States just in cyberspace.  This notion of a digital Cold War is but spawning another race, this time firmly held in the world of ones and zeros.  

Hundreds of terabytes, if not thousands of terabytes of data have been stolen and compromised out of a fight to be the superior nation, mainly at the hands of the Chinese.  What should be noted, however, is that if the digital cold war were to go hot, it wouldn't be the traditional soldier in the "crosshairs" so to speak but the citizens of the United States who are affected the most.  A case study to what might occur includes the cyber attacks against Estonia as perpetrated by Russia and Russian sympathizers.  As a result, banking systems were taken offline, giving no access to banking information for any of Estonia’s citizens.  More devastating was the fact that the internet was basically brought offline for an entire country.  And while the incident is driven by pride of the moving of a statue, this incident is almost as symbolic as the first dropping of the atomic bomb in World War II.  

These are the new fears we face in this modern world.  It used to be a fear of being cut off from food, water, and shelter, but has escalated to adding the potentially for no communications, a destroyed financial system, and worse yet, potential disinformation at the hands of the "perceived" enemy whom ever they may happen to be as it's extremely easy to filter the true location of where network packets come from.  

Ultimately, these concerns drive the innovation of entire countries such that a way of life not be destroyed over the ideology of but a few.  Sadly though, there might not be a happy ending as we saw when Apollo 11 landed on the moon, but a constant reminder that our information might be stolen or poisoned and we might not even know it at any time.