The massive tech failure that caused chaos around the world raises important questions about the ownership and control of our digital world.  The relatively unknown, cyber-security firm CrowdStrike admitted that the problem was caused by an update to its antivirus software, which was designed to protect Microsoft Windows devices from malicious attacks. 

The outage was caused by just a tiny software update from CrowdStrike put into Microsoft programs bringing them down globally  My ‘techie’ programmer friends tell me that it looks like two very basic coding errors that should have been spotted and tested before being ‘forced’ onto Microsoft operating systems. 

CrowdStrike is a US firm based in Austin, Texas, listed on the US stock exchange and employs 8500 people with 24,000 clients.  As a provider of cyber-security services, it tends to get called in to deal with the aftermath of hack attacks.  But it also provides protection from viruses and cyber attacks – but not apparently from its own programs.

The failure hit banking and healthcare services badly with over 8.5 million machines using Microsoft.  Airlines and airport systems failed, leading to 3300 cancelled flights.  Many companies’ payroll systems have been affected, meaning that thousands of employees will not get their monthly wages on time.  The outage could cost billions of dollars worldwide and take weeks to resolve because computers will require a manual reboot in ‘safe mode’, causing a massive headache for IT departments everywhere

What this outage reveals is the massive dominance of both Microsoft and CrowdStrike in computer software and cyber security.  Microsoft Windows has about 72% of the global market share of operating systems, while CrowdStrike’s market share in the ‘endpoint protection’ security category is 24%.  So the world’s information, payments, transport and communications are dependent on the decisions and operations of just a few privately-owned ‘for (massive) profit’ companies.  As one campaigner put it: “Today’s massive global Microsoft outage is the result of a software monopoly that has become a single point of failure for too much of the global economy”.

One problem arising from this is that there is no diversification of operating systems.  Again, my techie friends reckon that Microsoft Windows is a very poor operating system vulnerable to bugs and other coding errors, unlike other systems, including free ‘open source’ ones.  “For decades, Microsoft’s pursuit of a vendor lock-in strategy has prevented the public and private sectors from diversifying their IT capabilities. From airports to hospitals to 911 call centers to financial systems, millions today are feeling the consequences of the greed and ego of one of the most egregious offenders in Big Tech.  When just three companies—Microsoft, Amazon, and Google—dominate the market for cloud computing, one minor incident can have global ramifications.”

What is the answer to this?  The techies say we need more back-up systems, say at least two independent providers for their core operations, or at least ensure that no single provider accounts for more than about two-thirds of their critical IT infrastructure.  Then if one provider has a catastrophic failure, the other can keep things running. But it is one thing to have back-up systems, it is another to diversify into different operating systems that risk being not compatible with each other.  Again, my techie friends reckon that many bugs and outages are due to different systems operating in one company.  That means there is no one ‘beginning to end’ view.  As a result, if things go wrong in one part of the business tech-wise, the tech teams cannot see why from the other end of the business process.  Too many cooks have spoilt the broth.

Is more regulation of the big tech companies the answer? I think not.  Regulation of capitalist ‘for profit’ companies by government regulatory agencies has been a proven failure in just about every sector: finance, utilities, transport, communications etc.  These companies just ride roughshod through regulations, pay their fines if found out,but then carry on ‘business as usual’.

What about breaking up the big tech monopolies?  This is a common cry from some:  “it is long overdue that Microsoft and other Big Tech monopolies are broken up—for good.  Not only are these monopolies too big to care, they’re too big to manage. And despite being too big to fail, they have failed us. Time and time again. Now, it’s time for a reckoning. We can’t continue to let Microsoft’s executives downplay their role in making all of us more vulnerable.”

But anti-trust measures that break up large companies have done little in the past.  The major economies are even more dominated by large companies than they were one hundred years ago.  Take the US government break-up of Standard Oil in 1911, when it controlled over 90% of the oil sector in the US.  Did that break-up lead to the creation of lots of small ‘manageable’ oil companies globally that worked in the interests of society?  No, because in many industries economies of scale must operate to raise productivity and for capitalist firms to maximise profitability.  Now one hundred years after the Standard Oil break-up, we have even larger multi-national energy companies controlling fossil fuel investment and energy prices.

It’s the same debate with digital banking.  Just the day before the CrowdStrike global outage, the Bank of England reported that its banking transactions service CHAPS had broken down, delaying many time-sensitive payments.  It seems that the international SWIFT cross-border payments system had an outage for several hours.  And indeed, there has been a litany of banking system failures at ATMs and in digital transactions over the last 20 years. 

The major banks worldwide spend huge amounts of money on speculating in the stock and bond markets, but do not spend nearly enough to ensure that basic banking services for the public (both households and small companies) work seamlessly.  This is sometimes called ‘tech debt’. It has led some to argue that we need to stop full digitilisation of money transactions. 

Cash remains a safe fallback when digital payments break down.  The UK’s GMB Union said “cash is a vital part of how our communities operate”. When you take cash out of the system, people have nothing to fall back on, impacting on how they do the everyday basics.”  Cash, it is argued, also provides more control over people’s money.  Martin Quinn, campaign director for the PCA, said using cash allowed for anonymity. “I don’t want my data sold on, and I don’t want banks, credit card companies and even online retailers to know every facet of my life,” he said. Budgeting by using cash is also easier for some”.

And the example of what the Indian government did in 2016 is a lesson on this.  The Indian government abruptly wiped out most of the nation’s paper currency in hopes of ending ‘black money’ and curbing corruption.  But a November 2017 study of 3,000 regulated agricultural markets for 35 major agricultural commodities, conducted during the three months immediately following demonetization, concluded that eliminating the high-currency notes had reduced the value of domestic agricultural trade by more than 15 percent in the short run, settling at 7 percent reduction three months late.  In a largely ‘informal economy’, where the most vulnerable people still have no access to digital payments, this demonetization was a draconian measure that did a lot of damage to the poorest people in India.

But again, it would be wrong to conclude that we must go back to cash.  Cash under the mattress may protect against the prying eyes of the authorities, but it would remain an inefficient method of money transactions and, as we know, an attraction to criminality.  Of course, violent robbery of personal and corporate cash (as we see in action films) has now been replaced by the silent extraction of people’s savings and company accounts by cyber scams.  But that does not mean digitalization of money should be reversed.

The question really centres on who owns and controls our digital world. The high concentration of that digital power is yet another reason for the replacement of capitalist corporations by public companies democratically controlled by popular bodies and the tech workers in them.  We need to bring into public ownership the Magnificent Seven of social media and tech companies currently led and controlled by multi-billionaires who decide what to spend and where.  Then the huge waste of resources on tech projects designed just to make money and not to deliver useful and safe systems beneficial to people’s lives could be reduced dramatically. Human error would not disappear, but the organisation and control of our increasingly digital world could be directed towards social needs not private profit.

Michael Roberts reviews the recently released Dunkirk.

Taught to children in schools up and down the country, the evacuation of Dunkirk is ingrained into the very culture of Great Britain. Images, paintings and newspaper clippings which tell the story of 400,000 British troops attempting to retreat from France with the enemy closing in on all sides has become nothing short of iconic.

The zeitgeist of this timeless story has a new addition brought to us by director Christopher Nolan - the auteur responsible for the likes of Momento, the ground-breaking temporally-shifting memory drama and The Dark Knight trilogy, which re-wrote the genre handbook of the super-hero movie.

In his first feature since 2014’s sci-fi epic, Interstellar, Nolan’s depiction of the Dunkirk evacuation follows several intimate stories that weave into an equally grandiose narrative. Much like Interstellar, the scale of this film is awesome; ‘awesome’ here being used in the original sense of the word whereby it fills the viewer with an irrefutable sense of overwhelming vastness and in this case, dread. Though this film’s backdrop is not measured in light years but by the comparatively short distance of the British Channel, Nolan does a remarkable job of building this world to feel both enormous and close, really synthesising the desperation of the ‘so close but so far’ mentality of his characters.

The characters of Dunkirk in a sense both make and break this film; the young, predominantly unknown actors who play the British boys attempting to flee the beach show real talent and indeed, the casting of pop-star Harry Styles is far more than a needless cameo - he genuinely delivers an emotional, believable performance. Having said this the characters these boys play are very much blank slates with little real personalities - perhaps this is a comment on the toll the war has taken on the boys or a suggestion that they are simply pawns in a greater game - but nonetheless something feels lacking. Whatsmore the casting of Sir Kenneth Branagh and Tom Hardy feel somewhat wasted on characters with basic dialogue and limited screen time.

When it comes to Dunkirk’s set pieces and cinematography however, the film really does become a fiercely visceral experience. From its vicious establishing scene, Dunkirk is inherently unsafe. The way Nolan’s camera plays with distance is synonymous with the film’s beauty. The extreme close ups used in times of imminent danger are terrifying and induce a very real form of claustrophobia upon the viewer. One shot in particular perfects this idea and sees the young private, Tommy covering himself like hundreds of thousands of other soldiers on the beach, the viewer is suspended as the enemy bombs hit the sand progressively closer. Equally, the vast sweeping shots of the epic set pieces, of the endless beach and the at-times seemingly infinite Channel along with the aerial tracking of the spitfire dog fights are profoundly beautiful. Nolan constantly reminds you of both the large scale and intimate implications of the bitter war with these simple examples of incredibly intelligent filmmaking.

Strange though it is to write, while what is shown on camera works well to set a sinister scene, it's also what isn't shown that creates Dunkirk’s dark aura. The film deals extensively with the theme of absence, reflecting all of the characters: those boys without safety, without home, without hope - and debatably the most eerie absence is actually that of a physical enemy. Throughout Dunkirk’s smidge-over hour and a half runtime you almost never see an actual human enemy, often teased only in gunfire from afar. This unnerving use of absence along with Hans Zimmer’s urgent ticking score creates an incredibly unsettling disoriented sense paranoia.

At times Nolan’s desire to disorientate the viewer however, only results in confusing them and this is perhaps one of the ways in which Dunkirk unravels itself slightly. Throughout the narrative we follow three stories, the boys on the beach, the pilots in the air and the heroes from home racing across the channel, but these stories unfold not only at differents point on the map but in alternating time frames as well. These totally different temporal narratives are deeply jarring - and perhaps this is the intention but it does often feel incoherent and frustrating to watch. Disappointingly, this disruption frequently drags the viewer out of the otherwise immersive, horrifying and sentimental journey.

You will likely read reviews, a lot of reviews, that profess this film to be Christopher Nolan’s panicle – the best film he’s ever made; don’t be fooled - it’s not. But regardless of its flaws, not only is Dunkirk a visual masterpiece, it is inevitably destined to become a classic of its genre, if not the one of the defining British war films. Dunkirk builds beauty out of tragedy in the carnage of war. It stands as both a remarkable and brutal exhibition of the greatest military evacuation in history and a strong salute to British wartime spirit.