We Try and Kill the Internet

Summary

Podcast Summary: Are We Doomed? – "We Try and Kill the Internet"
NPR Network | Host: Ben Bradford | Airdate: June 2, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this gripping episode of "Are We Doomed?", host Ben Bradford explores the chilling scenario of a world without the Internet. Rather than simple inconvenience, Bradford and a cast of renowned cybersecurity experts reveal how deeply society’s critical infrastructure is tied to the web—and ask whether it could actually be destroyed or disabled for good. With real-life examples, technical explanations, and classic doomsday humor, the episode investigates Internet fragility, potential failure points, and the often-overlooked threat of political shutdowns.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Hidden Fragility of the Modern Internet

• A localized Internet outage in Northern Arizona in 2015 (00:17) demonstrated how a single cable cut can cause widespread chaos—ATMs, emergency services, banks, and basic communications halted.
• Ben Bradford underscores the “all eggs in one basket” risk: society’s dependence on power, satellites, cables, and software, and how even short outages reveal deep vulnerabilities (01:08–02:51).
• Quote: "To me, that's the definition of fragility." – Ben Bradford (01:31)

2. What a Total Internet Collapse Would Mean

• Interview with Bruce Schneier, famed cryptographer and author of Click Here to Kill Everybody (02:51).
• A lost Internet cripples not just communications but commerce, logistics, energy grids, water utilities, and even access to housing and hospitals (03:20–06:13).
• Quote: "In a lot of ways, nothing happens." – Bruce Schneier (04:14)
• Many critical sectors lack “analogue” or mechanical backups—the Internet has become as essential as water or power.
• Quote: "I always think about the most important things for society. Power, communications, finance. Then after that is transportation. And if you think about all those things require the Internet to work. It really feels like a fundamental human right at this point." – Bruce Schneier (05:15)

3. Can the Internet Be Destroyed? (Red Hatting Exercise)

• Bradford brings in Doug Midori, an Internet outage expert, to simulate ways to "kill the Internet" (08:15).

• Physical attacks:

  • Undersea cables form the “arteries” of worldwide data, largely unprotected, but their sheer number and distribution make coordinated sabotage a “Bond villain” scenario (08:48–12:15).
  • The Internet was designed with nuclear survivability in mind—a “distributed network” with few chokepoints (12:15–13:55).
  • Natural disasters (e.g., solar storms) remain a serious, if rare, existential threat to all electronics (13:55–14:24).

• Cyberattacks:

  • The 2016 Mirai botnet attack via mundane devices (printers, webcams) magnified the vulnerabilities of obscure yet essential companies like Dyn, whose failure caused widespread outages (16:17–17:38).
  • The real risk is attacking "wonky" backend services—especially those managed by a single company (e.g., Verisign, handler of ".com" domains) (18:08–19:08).
  • Quote: "If .com stopped working, a lot of stuff wouldn't work." – Doug Midori (18:23)
  • However, most major targets are heavily fortified (“the Slack Avengers”), and industry coordination makes total cyber-kill nearly impossible, though significant temporary outages are possible (19:21–20:33).

• The weakest link:

  • Schneier points out that much necessary Internet “plumbing”—open-source software, libraries, or protocols—may be maintained by a single under-resourced individual (22:23–24:02).
  • Quote: "You don't want to know this, but some of them are open source, public domain, maintained by one guy who doesn't have a real job and is kind of depressed, but is doing it..." – Bruce Schneier (22:42)
  • But resilience remains strong due to the “cobbled-together, perpetually in beta” nature of Internet engineering, though vulnerabilities lurk (24:17).

4. Real Threat: Political Shutdowns, Not Just Technical Ones

• The simplest way to end the Internet is political, not technological. Authoritarian regimes (e.g., Myanmar, China, Iran, Russia) have demonstrated the power to order full or partial blackouts (28:35–32:54).
• Internet suppression can severely harm not just dissent and protest but also emergency response and public safety, as in the aftermath of Myanmar’s 2021 coup (29:42–31:16).
• Quote: "The technical means...trying to build a resilient Internet in that country doesn't matter. At the end of the day, you have a sovereign government...They can just issue an order, turn it off." – Doug Midori (31:00)
• Even in the U.S., proposals for a national “kill switch” have surfaced, though not enacted (31:16–32:54).

5. Could Emerging Technologies Pose New Risks? (AI and Infrastructure Consolidation)

• The rise of AI poses new offensive and defensive possibilities for cyber conflict—making the battle between attackers and defenders even more unpredictable (26:40–27:14).
• The Internet's increasing consolidation into a few huge cloud providers (Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle) transforms a once-distributed network into one with more chokepoints and “single points of failure” (21:07–21:59).
• The key to future resilience may lie in better funding for critical but understaffed open-source projects and in designing for failure instead of profit (27:14–27:59).
• Quote: "If you want to get as much profit as you can out of the system, you don't design failure. You're designed for normal use. Then when a failure happens, it's much more catastrophic." – Bruce Schneier (27:59)

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Memorable Moments & Notable Quotes

• On life without the internet:
  "Our entire country has forgotten how to get and give directions." – Bruce Schneier (06:31)

• On DIY doomsday:
  "Attacking the Internet is kind of like fist fighting a bowl of pasta. A single blow doesn't do a lot of damage. Plus the pasta has a 24 hour security service and an on call repair team." – Ben Bradford (25:16)

• On the ultimate vulnerability:
  "The best defense for the Internet is still freedom, but also like, I don't know, maybe make some more backups so we can still get water if these guys are wrong." – Ben Bradford (33:10)

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Important Segments & Timestamps

• 00:17 – Real-life Arizona outage and intro to Internet fragility
• 02:51 – Bruce Schneier on the domino effects of Internet collapse
• 08:15 – Doug Midori: Red Hatting the Internet’s destruction
• 09:39 – Tonga’s undersea cable disaster
• 12:15 – Origin story: Distributed networks built to survive nuclear war
• 16:17 – 2016 Mirai botnet attack on Dyn
• 18:08 – The threat of attacking “.com” (Verisign) or cloud giants
• 22:23 – The "one guy in a basement" software risk
• 28:35 – Political kill switches: Internet blackouts in Myanmar, China, Russia
• 31:00 – Doug Midori on the inescapable power of sovereign states over the Internet
• 32:54 – Bruce Schneier: US democracy as the ultimate safeguard
• 33:10 – Host’s final take and call for analog backups

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Conclusion

The episode ultimately demystifies both the horror and the hype surrounding Internet doomsday scenarios. Far from being easy prey for villains or hackers, the Internet is resilient—so much so that even its chief critics and doomsayers see technical apocalypse as unlikely. The greater threat lurks not in natural disasters or master hackers, but in government overreach and undemocratic power. To protect the Internet, focus on upholding freedom and strategically bolstering overlooked technical foundations.

Final Notion: If you’re concerned about Internet collapse, worry less about Bond villains and more about democracy—and maybe donate to that software engineer in the basement.

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End of Summary

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

True story. 2015, Northern Arizona. TV screens cut out. ATMs broke down. Credit card readers gone. Cell phone service gone. 911 jammed. Banks, courthouses, bars, you name it in disarray. The Internet had gone out for half a day in one small corner of the United States. So here's a question. What if it was longer? What if the outage went further? What if we couldn't get our World Wide Web back ever? And could this happen?

[C]

We don't know how to exist in a pre Internet world anymore.

[A]

Foreign

[B]

this is. Are we doomed from nuanced tales distributed by the NPR network? I'm Ben Bradford. If you think about it, humanity has put pretty quickly a lot of eggs in one network connected basket, an amazing one, but a basket that requires heaps of power. Satellites, ocean spanning cables, spiderwebs of fiber optics, and a whole lot of software coming in and out from around the world, all to make it work. What the people of Northern Arizona found a decade ago was that having just one major cable cut, that's what did it. Big cable cut, probably by thieves looking for copper. It wreaked havoc. To me, that's the definition of fragility. So to feel safe, I think we should figure out the answer to two One, if the Internet did vanish, what would it really mean? What kind of backups do we have? Could we recover? And two, is this just some fever dream of an overdoomed mind, or is there any way this could happen? We're going to find out. Because today we try and kill the Internet. Okay, this might sound like an underwhelming doom. We know what happens when our Internet goes out, right? It's annoying. You can't stream the masked singer or whatever. I promise you, the reality of a massive extended Internet outage is worse than you think.

[C]

All right, you want to introduce me as the person who wrote this book,

[B]

Click Here to Kill Everybody. Now we're talking.

[C]

I've been thinking about Internet security, what he calls cybersecurity for decades.

[B]

This is Bruce Schneier. Cryptographer, writer, Harvard lecturer, legendary voice in cybersecurity. He's been worrying about the Internet's resilience since before America Online mailed its first trial disk. And as you might surmise from the title of that book, he thinks no Internet would be A problem.

[C]

So it's not what doesn't work, it's like what works. And it will be surprising how many things don't work.

[B]

A magician vanishes the Internet in a puff of smoke. It's gone. You know you can't make wi fi calls, but also cell phone towers are down. Even the old stalwart, the landline could go down. Too many modern landlines are voiceover Internet. You can't access your banking app, but who cares if it stays out? You're not getting paid. Your office handles payroll over the Internet. Bruce says a check wouldn't matter anyway because what are you going to buy? Stores are now running out of products

[C]

because they restock using these network systems.

[B]

Warehouses can't track inventory, shipping bills, customs data, the whole complicated magical way that goods move through our society breaks down,

[C]

groceries don't get delivered, communication doesn't happen, commerce doesn't happen, planes don't fly. In a lot of ways, nothing happens.

[B]

And then, he says it gets worse. Managers of the electric grid are increasingly relying on the Internet to balance energy flows. And over time you're not getting power,

[C]

you're not probably not getting water after a while.

[B]

Even our drinking water, Bruce says now somehow requires Internet.

[C]

How long before the treatment plants stop working and then the water stops flowing? Is it a week, is it a month? I don't know. And it really depends on the age of the infrastructure, which will be localized or maybe it degrades. Maybe you still get water and it's just funny colored and smells weird.

[B]

The cloud suddenly gets fed up with the unspeakable filth we've exposed it to. It packs up and drifts away. It sounds like we have not just lost convenience, but something essential.

[C]

I always think about the most important things for society. Power, communications, finance. Then after that is transportation. And if you think about all those things require the Internet to work. It really feels like a fundamental human right at this point.

[B]

If it's true that we really do need the Internet to function, then what are the fail safes? Critical systems have backups. The power goes out at a hospital. It has diesel generators, voting machines break. There's still a paper printout of the votes. An elevator cable snaps. Mechanical brakes lock in to halt the car from hurling to fiery ruin. If the Internet snapped, what are the mechanical brakes? Bruce says in many cases there are none.

[C]

I don't think there's any rolling back. You know, we don't know how to exist in a pre Internet world anymore.

[B]

Most newspapers don't have printing presses anymore. Hospitals have those generators. But if the Internet goes down, so do their electronic medical records. New apartments often use key cards tapping into the cloud to open their doors. You can't get into your apartment without the Internet.

[C]

I mean, our entire country has forgotten how to get and give directions. It's just hard to imagine society functioning.

[B]

So a flying saucer sucks the Internet into its tractor beam. That leaves society in a pretty big lurch. I will say I'm skeptical that humans wouldn't eventually figure it out. But I think it's clear it would take some time to get up to speed. And in the meantime, it'd cause a pretty shocking amount of havoc and probably not a little death if the Internet vanished. I'm personally stunned at the degree to which critical systems do not have analog backups. But a key reason for that is a lot of decision makers are quite sure that we're not going back to a world without Internet because no deity, UFO or Gandalf is coming to wipe it away. They are confident the Internet pretty much cannot be destroyed. Should they be? If we're utterly reliant on the Internet for groceries and drinking water, and it's true that there's no fail safes and no easy rollback to pre digital times, then a very important question is, can we kill the Internet? So we're going to attack the Internet in order to save the Internet so that you can keep drinking water. In tech terms, it's called red hatting. You hire someone from the inside to take on the role of adversary against their own system. Find the faults, see what can break. And so I have recruited Doug Midori, a specialist in identifying Internet outages, preventing them, and fixing them.

[D]

There's never a dull day, and we get a lot of practice.

[B]

Well, look, we've called you here to do the opposite of your job. We've called you here to destroy as much of the Internet as you can as efficiently as you can. Please do so. Yeah, Doug says the most obvious thing, the most straightforward, would seemingly be to take out the hardware, the pipes. And the biggest, most important pipes are the undersea cables that connect data across continents. So let's start there.

[D]

We run these fiber optic cables on the seafloor between continents to make the Internet work. It's like a garden hose just running on the surface of the sea floor.

[B]

There are hundreds of undersea cables spanning more than 800,000 miles. They're sort of like arteries carrying huge streams of data from continent to continent.

[D]

And there's no protection at all.

[B]

There's no protection.

[D]

The Only protection is that it's just so far away from everything, it's very hard to reach.

[B]

But they can be reached and damaged. In Tonga, in 2022, an undersea volcano blew through the ocean's floor. Smoke and ash erupted into the sky. The force of the explosion unleashed a devastating tsunami. And that explosion also ripped through the underwater cave cable that delivers Internet to Tonga.

[D]

They were without any kind of connection to the outside world.

[B]

For weeks, without communication, other countries struggled to provide relief. Tongans couldn't access outside money. Much of the nation relies on remittances from family off the islands. Those stopped. In that case, it was a natural disaster that cut off Tonga from the Internet. But people do attack undersea cables, and it's hard to prove sabotage. Although countries are constantly accusing each other because the cables are unprotected, innocent, perfect for attack.

[D]

I guess the Hollywood scenario of the James Bond villain kind of thing is could you put timed explosives on submarine cables at really deep spots? You'd want to do a lot of those.

[B]

Picture it. Doug spins around in his office chair, slow petting a cat. A map of the world's spiderweb of fiber optic cables sits in front of him. Red thumbtacks stick out at our key pinch points under the sea. His face is lit by a dozen monitors showing drones swimming down toward these targets. Down they go. Deep, deep into the ocean. Drifting past the creepy and probably misunderstood angler fish with the little lights on their heads. The drones reach our biggest Internet cables and attach their explosives. Doug counts 3, 2, 1, 10. Did we do it? Theoretically, if we've hit every single undersea cable with a remote controlled drone carrying timed explosives, kind of, at least all international communication would be compromised. So no more shopping on temu. It'd still leave a lot of Internet within countries, especially here in the US

[D]

So the average Internet user in North America rarely has any traffic that goes across the Atlantic or leaves the United States.

[B]

Doug says Americans could still message friends and pay with their cards.

[D]

Because we're a hub of the Internet architecture.

[B]

If we want to take out the Internet fully here, we also need to blow up fiber optic cables between major data centers, in cities, in rural areas. And at a certain point, with the amount of damage we're doing, the Internet would not be the biggest problem. And to pull this off would really take Bond villain type resources and coordination.

[D]

It makes for a good film or a TV show, but you'd probably be better going after something that wasn't as spectacular.

[B]

Here's why. Attacking the Internet's infrastructure Would be such a nightmare project. In the early 1960s, Cold War tensions and nuclear arsenals were building. A researcher at the defense think tank the Rand Corporation sought a way for the US to continue to communicate in a post apocalyptic nuclear wasteland. He figured out if you shaped your network as a spiderman web, it would have no chokepoints and you could design the information to go through that web, Always sensing an upcoming broken section, bypassing it and continuing down whatever routes remained. It's called a distributed network and this researcher's work, depending on who you ask, either influenced or at least mirrors how the World wide web was built. Which means the good news for our drinking water and our ship navigation and the the Masked singer is that the Internet was literally designed in a way that could survive nuclear war. So unless there's a Bond villain out there just accumulating undersea drones and nursing a real hatred of paywalls, there's probably only one realistic way to knock out the infrastructure that brings you Internet. A force of nature that we have no control over. Solar storms. A powerful burst of radiation from the sun. Sun makes a direct hit on us. Credible scientists, including at the national academies have calculated a massive enough solar flare could potentially fry all electronic wiring on Earth. Which would include the Internet. But again, a whole lot more. Every few years, a hoax makes the rounds claiming NASA has found just such a storm hurtling toward us. It hasn't. But that whole subject, solar storms and the earth's defense mechanism against them magnets are a fascinating scientific topic that deserve a whole nother episode that we will do. In the meantime, barring the center of our solar system hurling fire, Doug thinks we can turn our attention away from the hardware to a less obvious but potentially more vulnerable target. If we want to break the Internet, we don't want to spend a lot

[D]

of money, probably for something cheaper. You could do equal amount of damage by just hacking into something.

[B]

Could a big enough cyber attack take down the Internet forever?

[E]

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[B]

In 2016, our devices rebelled. Printers, webcams, DVRs attacked. They banded together, millions of them, and they nearly took down the Internet. The devices had been infected by a virus and they began sending request after request to one specific company, a company that I'd never heard of, but that played a key role in keeping a lot of the Internet running. Dyn the deluge of requests to Dyn's servers, a denial of service attack crashed it and caused a cascade of damage. If you were listening to Spotify, your music began stuttering and then shut off. If you were searching for restaurants on Yelp, house hunting on Zillow, reading the websites of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, fox, cnn, playing video games, buying coffee with a Starbucks gift card. They all failed. Amazon went down. PayPal went down. Someone took down the Internet, the headline read. Dyne had played a little known wonky role, translating website names into numbers for other computers to read. I don't know. But the point is, if we want to break our Internet here we have a much more promising roadmap, says our network defense guy, Doug Midori. You target the right wonky Internet thing us laypeople don't even know exists.

[D]

Something that most people have no awareness of, but it's operating on your behalf.

[B]

You launch the right cyber attack,

[D]

you could just keep flooding the whole space with updates where you're constantly changing stuff

[B]

and everything from Amazon to Zillow gone. All perfect.

[A]

Zillow naked.

[D]

There's a scenario there you could probably overwhelm all of the Internet routing.

[B]

Doug even has an example of the kind of target that could do maximum damage.

[D]

I don't want to pick on them, but if you take like Verisign Yeah, really big company. You know, they do a lot of things, but they're famous for handling dot com.

[B]

Sorry, they handle.com?

[D]

yeah, they're responsible for dot com.

[B]

One company is in charge of dot com's also dot net.

[D]

Any website that ends in dot com, when you visit it, you're likely hitting one of their servers. Just hypothetically speaking, if.com stopped working, a lot of stuff wouldn't work.

[B]

Every bank that I can think of. Google.

[D]

Yeah, kind of anything you think of that's legitimate.

[B]

So now we're talking a massive cyber attack breaks all.com sites. It's not the entire Internet going out, but effectively pretty close, right? And it doesn't require Bond villain money or the Sun. Could this actually work? Doug is skeptical. He says big Companies like VeriSign, proppingup.com have a whole army of coders shielding from attack.

[D]

They just spend all their days, every day to reinforce, to make sure that their service is super resilient, they never go down. They have super high security standards. And we really haven't had a Verisign outage.

[B]

Even the most damaging cyber attacks in digital history, like the great DVR uprising of 2016, only took down part of the Internet and for like a day. In that event, just one day's outage sparked widespread alarm. It spurred a call to arms in the cybersecurity community. After Dyne went down, Doug says it folks at major companies around the world assembled. The result, a Slack channel.

[D]

Somebody was like, hey, let's just get the key people from all the companies and just have them in one place so that they know how to reach each other.

[B]

Doug is one of the hundreds of specialists connected on Slack.

[D]

Even at competing companies, the experts are in regular discussion with each other.

[B]

Doug thinks this system works. We are more or less secure because there will always be a battle between bad actors looking for exploits and defenders shoring up code. But no cyber terrorist can do enough damage for long enough to put us into an internetless waterless world. The Slack avengers will save us. On the other hand, what if someone takes down slack? I mean, that's a joke, but only kind of.

[C]

This is one company making one product central to many companies Internet.

[B]

Bruce Schneier, our author of Click Here to Kill Everybody worries that this fact of a few big companies running a huge portion of the services we rely on has become a vulnerability in itself.

[C]

When you think about the survivability Internet, it was designed to be survivable. If pieces of the hardware fail, the network Self corrects. What the designers did not really anticipate was the monoculture in the software.

[B]

Dyn going down was bad, but Dyn has since been bought by Oracle, which runs a whole lot of other software. What if Oracle goes down? Consolidation really accelerated in the 2000 and tens. Microsoft and Amazon and Google and Oracle all ramped up marketing of a thing called the cloud. If you were a business or a government or a person, I guess you no longer needed your own private server hosting your online files and your software, you could pay for theirs. The companies built massive data centers, a trend that's only increasing with the AI boom. Nearly everyone's data is now traveling to and from the same places. These massive data centers, all controlled by just a few companies. What had been a distributed Internet has become a lot more consolidated with more chokepoints, meaning more potential weaknesses.

[C]

That's where the single points of failure are.

[B]

And yet that's still not necessarily where Bruce would attack if he were our Bond villain mastermind trying to bring down the Internet. He's not targeting verisign or Amazon with their armies of engineers. He's ducking the slack. Avengers. They're too obvious a target, too prepared. What would you do? What would you go after and how

[C]

you'd go after those little pieces of software that are critical?

[B]

Bruce says the web was built piecemeal. And so while some companies supporting it, your verisigns or Oracles grew large and powerful and protected, other parts are still just maintained by random engineers as labors of love.

[C]

You don't want to know this, but some of them are open source, public domain, maintained by one guy who doesn't have a real job and is kind of depressed, but is doing it the way you would go. You'd look deep down where no one's paying attention and there's a lot of plumbing down there that no one's paying attention to.

[B]

There's a web comic that's famous in computer science circles from the site xkcd. It shows a giant intricate tower of blocks that symbolizes all modern digital infrastructure. And at the bottom, on one side, holding it all up, there's one thin block.

[C]

It says piece of software maintained by some guy as a part time job in his basement. And that what's holding up the Internet?

[B]

This is my moment to remind you that the Internet brings you apparently water and power and your paycheck. Because Bruce says this comic is accurate.

[C]

I mean, the Internet, it's cobbled together, it's perpetually in beta. We are relying on an infrastructure that is Put together by companies with their own agendas, by hobbyists who are trying to do a nice thing. And there isn't a whole lot of deliberate, let's pay attention to this and make it reliable.

[B]

So the guy in his basement in the comic's finger slips and he accidentally deletes that critical part of the network he's been maintaining since 2003. Oopsie. Did we blow up the Internet? Bruce says, no idea.

[C]

You know, there's a lot of ways to get things working and Internet engineers are clever. Until it happens, you don't know what's more fragile and what's more resilient.

[B]

Here's the thing. I think we've identified the pinch points in the software, not the hardware in the biggest companies controlling vast swathes of data. And the small cramped basements where depressed engineers toil on our behalf. And we know what would happen if our Internet disappeared. And yet even the guy who has articulated this to us, the guy who wrote click here to kill everybody, just doesn't seem that concerned.

[C]

I think most of us are rightly not worried about that. It's like, do you worry about electricity failing? Kinda. You have a flashlight. One of the benefits of living in an advanced society is you don't have to worry about the infrastructure. Like you can take it for granted. And it's kind of nice to live that way.

[B]

Historically, attacking the Internet is kind of like fist fighting a bowl of pasta. A single blow doesn't do a lot of damage. Plus the pasta has a 24 hour security service and an on call repair team. So maybe it's fine. We can run the doom meter. Just cross this one off the list. It's definitely the most theoretical concern we've dealt with on this show. And you might even ask, why bother? Look, I know less about coding than anyone in the world, but I do know history is littered with examples of important technologies having unseen vulnerabilities. Athenian ships dominated ancient Greece until it turned out they couldn't handle head on collisions in World War II. The Germans believed their Enigma encryption was unbreakable until the allies cracked it. 1800s, Ireland found a magical way to feed its population with one easily propagated potato. And then a new disease arrived and wiped them all out. Is it really far fetched that the right virus, the right attack, could disrupt this network our current civilization has grown so reliant on to an extent that we have haven't experienced in its still relatively short history? Or that emerging technologies could provide new pathways toward that destruction? I asked Bruce.

[C]

I mean we can imagine an AI orchestrating some of this.

[B]

One thing AIs are good at is coding. Another is pouring out a lot of data quickly. Both useful for cyber attacks. Bruce says it creates a new frontier, but in the same old battle, there's

[C]

a lot of work right now on AIs, on attack and on defense. You can imagine countries building AI cyber weapons. Lots of us are trying to build AI defensive weapons. Gonna be a huge arms race over the next few years in that it's hard to know who's gonna win that.

[B]

In the meantime, Bruce does have a solve to make any attack harder, current or future. His answer, money.

[C]

The problem is actually not hard to solve. The issue is that it's expensive.

[B]

He thinks the sad basement dwellers need more cash, more support. Maybe someone can chip in for a Slack subscription.

[C]

We've been talking in our industry for years about better funding for some of these critical open source projects of which the Internet relies on.

[B]

He thinks the big players need to spend more money on resilience. Ultimately, he says the software side of the Internet should mimic the hardware side. The pipes, the cables, the parts that can survive nuclear war, because there are no chokepoints.

[C]

So it really is designing the systems for failure. If you want to get as much profit as you can out of the system, you don't design failure. You're designed for normal use. Then when a failure happens, it's much more catastrophic.

[B]

I thought we were going to leave it there, having discovered some vulnerabilities, but overall that security experts think this technology is pretty safe. And then almost offhand, Bruce mentioned that there is actually one really easy way to magically vanish the Internet from a society. One that doesn't require time bombs or cyber attacks or enlisting the sun.

[C]

So we have some examples of this around the world. Increasingly, countries, mostly authoritarian countries, will on occasion shut down the Internet in their country.

[B]

The easiest way to kill the Internet is not technical at all, it's political.

[A]

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[F]

New shows, new music, new movies. Keeping up with pop culture sometimes feels like a full time job. Thankfully, over at Pop Culture Happy Hour, it's literally our job. We break down what's actually worth watching, listening to, and pretending you already knew about. So the next time someone says, did you see that? You can say, yeah, obviously follow and page pop culture happy hour wherever you get your podcasts.

[B]

Myanmar's military ripped power away from the democratically elected government in a Coup. This was 2021. The pretext, false claims that the election had been rigged. The citizens of Myanmar responded by pouring into the streets. They planned protests. They scribbled on posters, save Myanmar. And almost instantly, the tools they were using to organize began disappearing. Facebook, Twitter, messaging apps, all stopped working. This wasn't novel. Governments have long known if you can't stop people from being angry, you can at least make it harder for them to find each other. China does this, as do other authoritarian states. Myanmar escalated. By the end of the month, the country was under what the BBC called a near total Internet blackout. And it's never really stopped. The government blocks the Internet when it wants to. Sometimes specific sites, sometimes entire regions. Total blackout.

[D]

I do worry that a lot of countries look at that and say, hey, that's not bad. Maybe I need a version of that.

[B]

Doug Midori, our Red Hatter, is really not that worried about time bombs or Bond villains or the sun. He describes himself as a half glass full guy, but he does worry about this.

[D]

The technical means of trying to build a resilient Internet in that country doesn't matter. At the end of the day, you have a sovereign government, usually with a telecom regulator that has a legal authority over the telecoms. And so then they can just issue an order, turn it off.

[B]

It could be no Internet entirely, as in Myanmar or Iran this year. It could be no social media, or maybe you can only use state backed apps. Russia has pushed its people to adopt a messaging and payment app called Macs. Not to be confused with hbo, every cell phone comes with Macs. Russia's sabotaged competitors, throttled YouTube, Instagram and others to force people onto Macs. It's another more granular way to ratchet up censorship and surveillance. And these types of Internet suppression don't just silence dissent in Myanmar. Last year, an enormous earthquake struck. 7.7 magnitude. Thousands died. And the news service Reuters reported that the lack of Internet communication slowed emergency response information was cut off when people needed it most. The United States is the central hub for so many Internet services. The biggest data centers, the most powerful companies, the sad basement dwellers thanklessly toiling to keep you and me able to watch the masked singer. We are fortunate to be at the center of the spider web. Blowing up an undersea cable or hacking the right company can only do so much damage. But even US Lawmakers have toyed with whether to add an Internet kill switch to the country, although no one's caught forward with it. So while I worry about things like AI, cyber war or our sun rudely burning down the web, both of our cyber experts, the optimist Doug and the pessimist Bruce Schneier, say the real security still relies on democracy.

[C]

We have outages that are deliberately caused by governments. Could you imagine a US Fascist government shutting down the Internet? I can. That'd be a greater Internet outage than we've ever experienced.

[B]

And so if we want to protect this incredible technology that provides water, we could build undersea cages around our cables and buy some gift cards for the slack avengers. I'm not saying we shouldn't, but it seems like, and probably this sounds cheesy, the best defense for the Internet is still freedom, but also like, I don't know, maybe make some more backups so we can still get water if these guys are wrong and the whole thing does go down. Next time on Are We Doomed? A big one. And my dad, I'd say without question,

[C]

we're going away to the Roman Empire.

[B]

Is he right? How civilizations fall and whether we're seeing signs now. Please support our show, Tell your friends, rate us, give us reviews. You can do more than anything else to help us get the word out. And if you want to do even more than that, go to doompod.com and thanks so much. We're on YouTube, fully animated each episode. YouTube.com arewedoomedpod Animation is by Alboris Kamalasad and his likeness of me is dead on. I'm Ben Bradford. Are We Doomed Is a production of Nuance Tales. Our producer is Lindsey Kilbride. Our editor is Tracy Samuel, Engineer and sound designer, Jay Sebold. Theme music composed by Dylan Dagenet. The show is distributed by the NPR network. Big thanks to Dan McCoy, Kalia Ali and the rest of the team at NPR for all they do. And most of all, thank you for listening.

[E]

This message comes from MIDI health co founders Dr. Kathleen Jordan and CEO Joanna Strober discuss why they started a virtual care platform for women in perimenopause and menopause.

[G]

The symptoms and experiences that women have in midlife, I think were underappreciated or possibly even trivialized. The changes of perimenopause and menopause create a broad spectrum of symptoms and can actually lead to long term health issues. But too few clinicians are trained in it.

[H]

I also want to add often the type of care that women are needing is very iterative. It requires trying different medications, learning about their body and learning how to take care of themselves. And so what we've tried to do at Midi Health is create a new type of care system that is responsive to to women's needs and helps them take care of themselves and stay healthy instead of just treating disease.

[E]

Midi Health committed to helping women in midlife with perimenopause and menopause care, accessible via telehealth visits at joinmidi. Com.