What Happens to Smart Cities When the Internet Dies? - Updated

Tim Maughan is the author of a new novel, Infinite Detail, in which the collapse of the Internet causes a complete social change. CityLab has published a long and quite fascinating interview with him that covers a wide range of topics. If you are worried about the dependence of modern society on a complex, computerized global supply chain (I am), you should enjoy the interview, and probably his novel.

I spent some time in 2014 traveling in China. I was with a group of architects and researchers on a trip to observe the supply chain backwards—the route that consumer goods take from China to Europe and America, but we were doing in reverse.

We were on this huge Maersk container ship. It's got like 10,000 containers on it, crew of about 20, and we were out in the middle of the South China Sea. I was talking to the captain, and as he talked, he was interrupted by this beeping sound, and he walks over to a computer and types something and then calls the engine room and tells them to slow the ship down. He comes back and starts to talk to me again. And I said, what happened there? He said, “I got an email from Maersk in Copenhagen telling me to slow the ship down.” And I asked, “Why?” He said, “I don't know.”

He said it probably means that there are delays at Ningbo port, so there’s no point using up fuel to get there on time. The supply chain algorithms decided it would be a waste of money.

That really shaped the book. We’re stuck in this huge network that we don’t understand. Even the people who seem to have responsibility over it don’t understand how it works. The senior captain of a container ship doesn’t understand why he’s slowing the ship down. He doesn’t know what’s in any of those containers. And this whole system that is telling him where to go, telling him how fast to go, is the same system telling the crane drivers which containers to load onto the ship and telling the truck drivers in the container ports we have to move the containers within the port.

There’s this huge planet-spanning networked system that’s controlling all this—controlling how our cities run, making sure that food and consumer goods and medicines and all these things that we want and more importantly need get to us. It’s a vast, largely now automated system that no individual understands, and more to the point, no individual can understand. We’ve handed so much control over this over to algorithmic systems—and over to the internet, in effect. I started thinking, so if this system disappeared, what happens? We don’t know how to replace it.