HACK ATTACK
An economically unstable and shock-prone world in which governments weaken, criminals thrive, and dangerous innovations emerge
Devastating shocks like September 11, the Southeast Asian tsunami of 2004, and the 2010 Haiti earthquake had certainly
primed the world for sudden disasters. But no one was prepared for a world in which large-scale catastrophes would occur with such breathtaking frequency. The years 2010 to 2020 were dubbed the “doom decade” for good reason: the 2012 Olympic bombing, which killed 13,000, was followed closely by an earthquake in Indonesia killing 40,000, a tsunami that almost wiped out Nicaragua, and the onset of the West China Famine, caused by a once-in-a-millennium drought linked to climate change.
Not surprisingly, this opening series of deadly asynchronous catastrophes
(there were more) put enormous pressure on an already overstressed global economy that had entered the decade still in recession.