“Efficiency is wonderful until the power goes out — then every app becomes a locked door.”
-adaptationguide.com
Digital-Only Is a Gamble on Other People’s Lives — and the House Is Already Burning
They tell you: paper is wasteful, processes must be efficient, "digital-only" is progress and anybody who resists is backward. That was the soothing sermon in the interview I was given to translate: officials and corporations promising simpler lives, insisting the elderly will “benefit” once they learn the apps, and that analog and digital can peacefully “transition” side-by-side. Fine — but let’s stop pretending this is abstract. Digital-first is a policy. Digital-only is a risk allocation decision with real victims.
Below: a hard, unsparing inventory from the archives — cases where the tidy logic of “efficiency through code” collapsed and people lost access to money, jobs, travel, and in at least one recorded case, timely medical care.
When factories went dark and whole supply chains teetered
An August/September 2025 cyberattack forced the world’s biggest automaker in Britain to suspend production across multiple plants for weeks. The hit wasn’t a brief glitch — it stopped production, froze parts tracking and ordering systems, and put tens of thousands of jobs and hundreds of smaller suppliers at immediate financial risk. The national government even moved to underwrite emergency loan guarantees to keep the supply chain afloat. This is not a hypothetical “efficiency trade-off” — it is a national economic shock triggered by a single digital breach. Reuters+1
When airport check-in systems go offline, travel grinds to a halt
Airports are one of the most visible places where digital centralization collides with scale. In recent months a coordinated attack on check-in/boarding infrastructure snarled operations at major European airports and forced manual procedures; passengers were delayed and flights canceled across hubs. This echoes past incidents — notably the catastrophic data-center failure that left tens of thousands of passengers stranded in 2017 — proving that airline and airport systems remain shockingly brittle when a single system fails. If “digital only” becomes policy at the airport counters, the consequence of a single outage is not an inconvenience: it is mass disruption. Reuters+1
When malware makes shipping companies into sitting ducks
Digital attacks do not respect sectoral boundaries. The NotPetya campaign in 2017 — aimed at one country — inflicted collateral carnage on global logistics, wiping systems at a major container shipping company and costing hundreds of millions while terminals and registration systems went offline. The ripple effect: delayed goods, disrupted supply chains, and commercial losses that dwarfed any theoretical “savings” digitalisation promised. That’s what “efficiency” looks like when the system fails: concentrated pain spread across the economy. Financial Times
When hospital networks are hit, patients lose time — sometimes life
This is where the rhetoric becomes obscene. In September 2020, a ransomware incident crippled the IT systems at a major hospital and forced staff to divert an emergency patient 30 km away; the patient later died. Prosecutors opened inquiries; experts warned it was only a matter of time before a cyberattack had a direct human fatality on its record. Other massive hospital cyber incidents have pushed health systems to paper, delayed surgeries, rerouted ambulances, and forced clinicians to improvise — all because critical care increasingly depends on networked systems. The risk is not abstract; it’s clinical triage made more difficult by code. AP News+1
The old big one — WannaCry and the public-service wake-up call
WannaCry in 2017 infected hundreds of thousands of computers across the globe and hit national health services hard: infected hospitals reported significant drops in admissions and elective procedures because systems were unusable. Researchers later quantified clear reductions in emergency and elective care in affected hospitals. The takeaway: you can’t say “public service modernization” and then shrug when a single propagated bug stops doctors from seeing patients. PMC
What the “digital fan club” keeps pretending not to see
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Concentration risk. When you move paperwork, payments, and routing into a handful of platforms or vendors, you create single points of catastrophic failure.
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Externalized social cost. Corporations chase internal efficiency; the downsides — missed paychecks for small suppliers, rebooked flights for families, delayed medical care — are borne by the public.
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Operational fragility. Backup plans are often theoretical. “Fallback” procedures are slow, poorly tested, or assumed to be unnecessary — until they are the only thing standing between normal life and chaos.
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Liability gaps. Who pays when a “digital-only” service breaks and people lose money, access, or life-saving care? If the answer is “no one,” then the policy is being run as an experiment on the public.
These aren’t alarmist abstractions. They are exactly what happens when engineers design for the happy path but do not architect for failure.
The thin comfort of adoption statistics is not enough
Yes, surveys show many citizens accept or use digital services and a majority report being okay with more digitalization. That acceptance is real — but the data also show a large minority who are cautious or excluded and point squarely at the need for transitional support and fallbacks. Digitization does not absolve public authorities of the responsibility to provide universal, resilient access. Initiative D21
A hard, non-sexy policy checklist (because warm words won’t save lives)
If you insist on “digital first,” then these must be mandatory:
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No “digital-only” for life-critical or livelihood-critical services. Medical access, social security payments, parking and permit systems, and essential travel must have guaranteed analog paths.
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Legally mandated resilience audits. Independent, public audits of vendor dependence, failover tests, and contingency plans — with results published and penalties for negligence.
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Robust offline fallbacks that are actually usable. Paper tickets, staffed counters, phone routing centers, and local kiosks that are regularly tested under real stress.
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Supplier risk limits. Public procurement rules must limit concentration: don’t let one vendor or one data center become the gatekeeper for an entire service.
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Liability and compensation rules for failures. If a “digital-only” rollout breaks livelihoods or endangers lives, there must be clear compensation and legal exposure for those who pushed the rollout without proper safeguards.
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A duty to fund local support. Training, hotlines, and in-person help aren’t charity — they’re infrastructure. Fund them, staff them, and evaluate them.
Final word — efficiency without humility is criminal hubris
Efficiency fetishists treat code like a silver bullet: faster, cheaper, cleaner. But code is written by fallible humans, runs on physical machines, and sits atop supply chains, telecoms, and vendors — all of which can fail. Every major sector that has gone “digital” has already recorded near-misses and, in some cases, direct harms. To ram “digital-only” policies through as a default while waving away contingency planning is not progress — it is a transfer of risk from institutions to people who can least afford it.
If you believe modernization matters, then modernize responsibly: mandate resilience, keep human pathways open for vital services, and stop treating the public as the test lab for your optimistic roadmap. The archives are not a warning; they are a record of avoidable calamities. Learn from them before the next outage becomes a tragedy.
Sources for the worst-case examples above (selected): Reuters reporting on the major automaker factory shutdown and supply-chain fallout. Reuters
Recent reporting on coordinated cyber disruption to European airport check-in/boarding systems. Reuters
A retrospective analysis of the WannaCry impact on hospital admissions and services. PMC
News coverage of the diverted emergency patient after a hospital IT attack that investigators linked to delays in care. AP News
Financial and industry reporting on the NotPetya attack’s impact on global shipping, including the huge hit to a major container operator. Financial Times
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