America’s Strength Is Built On A Local Foundation

This past July, just how reliant we are on technology and how vulnerable we are to its failures was highlighted when software security company CrowdStrike tried to upload an update to computers running on Microsoft Windows.
Far from a seamless operation, it crashed computers worldwide.
“Airlines grounded flights. Subways stopped. Operators of 911 lines couldn’t dispatch help. Stores shut down. Hospitals canceled surgeries,” Steve Lohr of The New York Times writes.
“The chaos, though it lasted only a few days, was telling. New advances make our lives easier, but there are trade-offs. They can vanish quickly — in an outage, a hack or a pandemic. And as the economy has become more dependent on a smaller number of technology companies, we’ve become more susceptible to hiccups that affect them.”
While America’s tech companies have made our lives better in many ways, they have also left us vulnerable not just to foreign hackers but to weaknesses we can’t anticipate. And, Lohr writes, “there are reasons to wonder if they have the incentive or even the capability to be trustworthy stewards of our collective security.”
Lohr talks about trustworthiness in relation to reliability. We also have concerns about it from our growing dependence on it for news and information as it erodes traditional, professional sources.
“The pandemic taught us a hard-earned lesson: Diversity enhances resilience,” Lohr writes. It is a profound point.
Reliance on too few suppliers, mega national and multi-national corporations consolidated through replacing hundreds of smaller local producers and suppliers of essential goods and services, weakens our nation’s resilience.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw parts of the U.S. economy come to a standstill due to our reliance on overseas manufacturers of computer chips essential to the production of vehicles, computers, appliances and nearly 170 other industries.
We saw shortages in pork production because of reliance on a handful of slaughterhouses.
Widespread shortages, rapid inflation, and flat-out manipulation of prices using the supply chain challenges to capitalize on higher costs that stayed in place even as supply chain issues were resolved were the result of our reliance on too few suppliers and too many in foreign countries.
“The biggest and most valuable companies also carry the most risk to the economy as a whole,” Lohr writes. “They are linked to more users, so if something happens to them, all the people who depend on them suffer.”  He quotes Tom Mitchell, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University who says these companies bring us considerable efficiencies and but also “incredible brittleness.”
Microsoft, Amazon and Google are dominant multi-billion-dollar corporations that control “cloud computing and software, online advertising and e-commerce.” Our reliance on them comes with what has been termed “systemic risk.” This reliance can have devastating impacts due to errors, glitches, or actions that put corporate greed ahead of what is good for consumers and citizens.
Meanwhile, America’s infrastructure is constantly under attack.
“On Jan. 31, FBI Director Christopher Wray testified before Congress, explaining how Chinese government hackers were trying ‘to find and prepare to destroy or degrade the civilian critical infrastructure that keeps us safe and prosperous,’” Stephen Webber of Rand writes.
“These hackers…’are positioning on American infrastructure in preparation to wreak havoc and cause real-world harm to American citizens and communities, if or when China decides the time has come to strike.”
At the same time, China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are doing their best to undermine American society and politics with disinformation campaigns.
Just this past month, the U.S. Justice Department charged Russia with paying right-wing influencers to air its propaganda. They received an estimated $10 million to produce stories that looked legitimate with information it fed them. Caught taking the payments, the influencers say they had no idea the money was being funneled to them through from RT, Russia’s state broadcasting company.
Russia’s propaganda, spread by “useful idiots” in the United States, is “used to turn other people into enemies and to create social divisions that really undermine the ability to reach consensus and solve collective problems, that really increase and exacerbate polarization,” disinformation expert Renee DiResta told Scott Simon of National Public Radio.
“Polarization and an inability to come to consensus - do have profound social impacts,” she said.
DiResta says that educating the American public to recognize fake news and propaganda is essential. It’s a start, but not enough.
We are seeing billions poured into supporting domestic computer chip production. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has received millions in funding to help expand local meat production in America. Congressional hearings have been conducted on what the country must do to harden its infrastructure against foreign state-sponsored sabotage.
However, there is one serious challenge this country is doing far too little to address – hardening and securing our local and trusted information sources. Nearly 3,000 community newspapers have disappeared in America pushing citizens to the internet where they focus on national divisive news.
We must nurture trusted sources of news – places people can reliably turn to for an accurate account of the news and the actions of their elected officials, industries, and financial institutions.
“At the national level, leaders should be cognizant of our current state of political polarization,” Webber writes of the Russians infiltrating America’s news ecosystem. “As in any attack meant to sow disruption and division, we do our enemies’ work for them when we panic.” We also do it by neglecting to support those trusted sources we are rapidly losing.
“If we act with the understanding that the homeland is already under attack, everyday Americans may realize that they are their neighbors’ best hope for safety and security,” he writes.
Civic education begins at home. It begins with local news. It is the news most trusted and that brings us closer to one another. It is a public good that deserves public support.
An informed citizenry is essential to the health of a representative democracy. Ours is sickened by misinformation and weakened by the loss of newspapers.