Who among my cohort of GenX hasn’t helped an aging parent sort through and unwind a text- or email-based scam of one or another sort - financial, romantic, personal info-based - to which they’ve fallen prey? And, if like me, you are mystified at the gullibility, who hasn’t also clicked a link just a bit too fast and found themselves wondering if they haven’t just given away the store as well?
The US Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has designated October as cybersecurity awareness month. Given the ubiquity of things so-called cyber in not just our daily lives, but in our moment-to-moment existence, exchanges and engagements as friends, consumers, sellers, buyers, colleagues, siblings, and parents it might be more reasonable to simply think of this month more broadly as a security awareness month. At any rate, in this day and age, taking a proactive and preventive approach to security is simply common sense and prudence at work. It seems a small price to pay for the upside of more peace of mind.
I am personally fascinated by the dissonance between the velocity of technological change and the more static nature of the human psyche and experience. The gap is already a yawning one and the noise - both true and white - around AI promises to accelerate it. Author and journalist Robert Wright has written about this misalignment between the power of technological change and the evolutionary blueprints that underlie our approach to the world. Do yourself a favor and check out his writing and thoughts on the topic.
I think of we GenX adults as a population that was young enough to assimilate and adapt to technology as it was introduced into our lives, but old enough to perhaps bring some skepticism and nostalgia for more simple and basic ways of communicating. In other words, we weren’t spoon fed a diet of screens growing up. But I also think that technology and its innovations are the shiny object that seems to have a direct line to our amygdalas.
In her 2007 collection Evocative Objects: Things We Think With author and anthropologist Sherry Turkle foreshadowed our vulnerability as a species to cyber scams: “We think with the objects we love and we love the objects we think with. In this cycle of affection and use, technology becomes intimate, and our guard falls.”
Please follow us over the next month as we post some thoughts about the cyber-enabled fraud and extortion scams to which folks fall prey online and over mobile devices, including real-world case examples that we have helped clients navigate.
To kick things off, I encourage you to check out Operation Shamrock, a comprehensive romance scam information resource for understanding how the seemingly innocuous email or text that lands is really a siren’s call that is the choreographed output of transnational criminal organizations that harvest and traffic in the dispossessed. It’s sobering stuff.