2020: A Blue Pill

Following slightly on the topic of the shape of the global economy, I think the pandemic of 2020 was exactly when the world swallowed a blue pill. It clearly seems the reality could have been as bad as the great depression, while we have gone through [the pandemic] entirely victorious and only with minor scratches.

The red pill reality does not matter anymore. The blue pill virtual reality is what we should now worry about. A deadly real virus has just a very minor impact (despite being spread globally), while a similarly spread computer virus may ruin economies and crash the world.

With our global dependency on just a few critical pieces of the virtual infrastructure, we are extremely fragile. And it is hard to imagine the impact of some of these critical elements falling apart in an instant. And we are completely unprepared for such an event.

Take cryptography as an example. Digital certificates in particular. They govern everything we do in the digital world. Communications, finances, factory floors. Should one of the technologies used by digital certificates be compromised, the collapse and chaos would be unimaginable. And surprisingly, with development of quantum computers, we are raging full steam ahead to break the cryptography used in digital certificates today.

And this is a well known problem. All experts are aware of the fact the only approved standards for digital certificates are not quantum-safe. Yet there are no replacements. Which might not have been such a problem before 2020, but clearly now, when with the help of the pandemic, we have shifted all our assets to the digital world, it probably is a bigger problem than any new mutation of a biological virus. This "blue pill" transition happened silently, like entering a road covered with black ice. We keep on riding enjoying the comfort of the car, not realizing the safety conditions have just changed dramatically.