A Letter from the Ephesians

I spent the other day at the ruined Roman city of Ephesus, on the Aegean Coast of what is now Turkey. Ephesus, unlike a great many other ancient cities, was not sacked or destroyed in war or built upon by later civilizations. Its residents eventually just abandoned it; its harbor having been silted in by changes in river flow, the coastline moved a few kilometers from what had been a port city, making it useless. The result of Ephesus's abandonment is that the city where Paul preached is today remarkably well preserved. Decades of excavations have uncovered whole swaths of the city and its infrastructure. The main drag, with its fabulously giant paving stones, is intact. The mosaics are spectacular. Sections of modular terra-cotta piping, which used to carry water throughout town, lie like ancient Legos, half-buried, in the streets. It all, naturally, turns the mind to cybersecurity. A couple of years ago, Jack and I were walking in Washington, and Jack analogized our cyber vulnerabilities to Roman infrastructure. The Romans, he notes, built roads that were the envy of the world. They allowed people, goods, and troops to move to all corners of the empire. They became a lasting symbol of Roman power and engineering sophistication. Yet these same roads, as the empire decayed, also eventually became the channel through which enemy armies walked in and defeated Rome. Infrastructural and technological triumphs gave rise to unanticipated vulnerabilities--indeed, they became the very channels of eventual attack. Something similar, Jack suggested, is happening to us now. We have built the channels through which our enemies can attack us, can steal our most valuable secrets. They are, like the Roman roads, the engine of our economic viability--and like the Roman roads as well, they create a vulnerability against which we may not be able to defend. Ruminating on the Fall of Rome while looking at antiquities is admittedly an abominable cliche, and I am certainly no expert in ancient history. But Jack's comments followed me around Ephesus. We have not only built such channels; we have networked our critical infrastructure to them. We have become pervasively dependent on communications infrastructure over which our governments exercise little meaningful control, and which reside entirely in the hands of private corporations. We make ourselves more and more dependent on networked technologies every day without even thinking about it, much the way the residents of this wealthy town did not give a whole lot of thought to how impossible their lives would be without the countless slaves it took to build the engineering feats we can still see. Our networked electronic devices are our slaves, and while delegating so much of the vitality of our civilization to such inanimate objects may remove the moral stigma from our dependency, it doesn't solve the problem of dependency--or the problems of what happens when our slaves suddenly serve another master. It is hard not to be awed by Roman engineering when you see it up close. And it's not like you can walk around Ephesus and see the seeds of later Roman destruction or anything like that. But I found myself walking around the city looking at the Roman engineering genius that remains, as Shelley put it about the Egyptians, "stamped upon these lifeless things"--and wondering if our transatlantic fiber optics might some day seem as cleverly hostile to our long-term survival as the lovingly cut stones that still pave the high street that leads down from the baths to the Great Library. And I found myself wondering if the iPad on which I later typed this post might some day seem as ingeniously beside-the-point as the brilliant system of terra-cotta piping that we can now dig out from under six meters of dirt. Ephesus is, perhaps, a bad example of the point that technological development breeds vulnerability. Its roads did not invite in the barbarian hordes, after all. It suffered, rather, from something closer to climate change--a weird shift in geography that rendered it suddenly non-viable as a city. Its people didn't die as a result; they moved. It may, in fact, be a good example of the converse of what we can expect as sea levels gradually rise and we have to abandon certain cities and make others into ports. Ephesus is a story ultimately of climate adaptation, not traumatic succumbing to the vulnerabilities technology births. Yet perhaps because I went there thinking about the relationship between infrastructure, security, technological dependency, vulnerability, and Rome, Jack's comments followed me around. And the ruins of Ephesus are certainly powerful testimony that infrastructure and innovation alone will not save a civilization. The engineering prowess behind this city, after all, rivals anything going on at Google today. The Googlers, after all, stand on the shoulders of giants. They measure progress is seconds, not in years or lives. They can experiment. The Ephesians had to cut every stone in their library by hand. They built marvels. Yet these marvels today amount to a forgotten outpost--if a very well-preserved one--of a dead empire, one whose technological genius amounts to a pile of ruins trodden over by chattering tourists snapping pictures, perhaps only one of whom was ruminating about cybersecurity. Indeed, Ephesus is today remembered for a reason altogether unrelated to its buildings, technology, and critical infrastructure. It is remembered chiefly because of the Book of Ephesians, the Apostle Paul's brief letter to the early Christian faithful of the city, where he spent some time. By legend, at least, the Virgin Mary also spent her last years there, and St. John wrote both his Gospel and the Book of Revelation on a nearby hill in what is now the lovely Turkish town of Seljuk--a hill on which John was also supposedly buried. Had I come to Ephesus as a Christian, therefore, I suspect that the site would thus speak powerfully to the ultimate emptiness of technological and engineering feats in the absence of spiritual meaning--the magnificent accomplishments of these builders having proven transient compared to a letter to a single group of spiritually committed residents. But I'm not a Christian, and I came to Ephesus thinking about earthly matters: the long-term survival of societies that have to live with their dependencies on the technologies they create. Here Ephesus does not offer lessons. It may not even offer a warning. It does, however, offer a reminder.