Except for Nuclear Weapons the Digital Revolution
Is Humanity’s Most Stupid Mistake
Paul Craig Roberts

Billions of login credentials have been leaked and compiled into datasets online, giving criminals “unprecedented access” to accounts consumers use each day.

The Internet and digital systems are insecure and cannot be made secure.  To operate in the digital world becomes increasingly risky by the day and harder to use.  The inherent insecurity of all digital systems has led to the requirement for multi-factor authentication. If you forgot to charge your cell phone or your service is down, you can’t reach your accounts because you can’t access the code texted to you necessary for you to access your account. We are already into triple authentication–password, texted code, emailed code.  In addition to these authentications, there are occasions when you use also answer questions, such as your mother’s maiden name, the street you lived on, your best friend’s name.  Sometimes the questions you have to answer are not even your questions.  They are questions that the site when it decided to add another layer of authentication came up with on its own. You then have to have the ordeal of getting in touch with a human and explaining that these are not questions that you supplied and know the answers to.

There are already sites that you cannot reach unless Cloudflare verifies that you are human. The site has to “review the security of your connection before proceeding.” For some reason Cloudflare cannot identify Apple’s browser Safari.  Consequently, Internet security prevents my access to some sites.  

It is going to get worse. I have noticed that it is increasingly difficult to use the internet.  It doesn’t work as well as it did. My guess is that the scramble for better security has produced incompatible security systems that block one another.  

Text messages to my cell phone sometimes never arrive; other times they arrive 2 or 3 days after they are sent.  

The idiot corporations were sold a bill of goods that the digital revolution would lower their costs by shifting the cost of customer relations to their customers.  Certainly the cost to customers in time and stress has gone up exponentially with the digital revolution. What in analogue days could be settled in a three minute telephone call answered on the third ring can in the new digital age take days to resolve, if it can be resolved.  

As for the idiot corporations, banks, and financial institutions, the executives are finding that the cost of digital security has more than eaten up all the savings from shifting the costs of customer assistance to the customer.  

The latest headline:  “Billions of login credentials have been leaked online, Cybernews researchers say” should tell us something.  But it won’t.  People are too stupid.  They love scrolling their cell phones.  

The digital revolution is the ultimate tool for criminals.  They can use it to steal your bank account, your retirement account, your identity.  They can load your credit cards up with their debt. They can sell your home out from under you. They can put things on your computer and cell phone for which you can be arrested.  

None of these things could happen in the analog world.

So why do we use the digital revolution?  We have been coerced.

When I close down this website, I will end my digital existence. I will use homing pigeons or smoke signals, or dispatch a messenger. 

Addendum:  It is clear that in the soon-to-be-arrived-at-future, whoever controls the AI algorithm will control what is true and what we are allowed to say and read.  It is already happening.  Recently, a friend posted on his X account two quotes from my June 19 article, “Is Trump’s Constituency Netanyahu or MAGA-America?”

Within less than 30 seconds his post was taken down and his X account cancelled.  This is X, the Twitter that Elon Musk purchased in order to restore free speech to social media.

Hon. Paul Craig Roberts is the John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. A former editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal and columnist for Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Service, he is a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles and a columnist for Investor's Business Daily. In 1992 he received the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 1993 the Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of the top seven journalists.

He was Distinguished Fellow at the Cato Institute from 1993 to 1996. From 1982 through 1993, he held the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. During 1981-82 he served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy. President Reagan and Treasury Secretary Regan credited him with a major role in the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, and he was awarded the Treasury Department's Meritorious Service Award for "his outstanding contributions to the formulation of United States economic policy." From 1975 to 1978, Dr. Roberts served on the congressional staff where he drafted the Kemp-Roth bill and played a leading role in developing bipartisan support for a supply-side economic policy.

In 1987 the French government recognized him as "the artisan of a renewal in economic science and policy after half a century of state interventionism" and inducted him into the Legion of Honor.

Dr. Roberts' latest books are The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with IPE Fellow Lawrence Stratton, and published by Prima Publishing in May 2000, and Chile: Two Visions - The Allende-Pinochet Era, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen Araujo, and published in Spanish by Universidad Nacional Andres Bello in Santiago, Chile, in November 2000. The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen LaFollette Araujo, was published by Oxford University Press in 1997. A Spanish language edition was published by Oxford in 1999. The New Colorline: How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, was published by Regnery in 1995. A paperback edition was published in 1997. Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, co-authored with Karen LaFollette, was published by the Cato Institute in 1990. Harvard University Press published his book, The Supply-Side Revolution, in 1984. Widely reviewed and favorably received, the book was praised by Forbes as "a timely masterpiece that will have real impact on economic thinking in the years ahead." Dr. Roberts is the author of Alienation and the Soviet Economy, published in 1971 and republished in 1990. He is the author of Marx's Theory of Exchange, Alienation and Crisis, published in 1973 and republished in 1983. A Spanish language edition was published in 1974.

Dr. Roberts has held numerous academic appointments. He has contributed chapters to numerous books and has published many articles in journals of scholarship, including the Journal of Political Economy, Oxford Economic Papers, Journal of Law and Economics, Studies in Banking and Finance, Journal of Monetary Economics, Public Finance Quarterly, Public Choice, Classica et Mediaevalia, Ethics, Slavic Review, Soviet Studies, Rivista de Political Economica, and Zeitschrift fur Wirtschafspolitik. He has entries in the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Economics and the New Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance. He has contributed to Commentary, The Public Interest, The National Interest, Harper's, the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Fortune, London Times, The Financial Times, TLS, The Spectator, Il Sole 24 Ore, Le Figaro, Liberation, and the Nihon Keizai Shimbun. He has testified before committees of Congress on 30 occasions.

Dr. Roberts was educated at the Georgia Institute of Technology (B.S.), the University of Virginia (Ph.D.), the University of California at Berkeley and Oxford University where he was a member of Merton College.

He is listed in Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World, The Dictionary of International Biography, Outstanding People of the Twentieth Century, and 1000 Leaders of World Influence. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: [email protected]

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