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Good bacteria and the white hats
Imagine that you have stumbled across a new process that extends the shelf life of perishable food indefinitely and makes it taste better at the same time. This is the holy grail of food scientists. Their efforts are targeted on finding chemicals that will make food taste better or lengthen sell-by dates. Actually, such a process already exists. It is free and has existed for thousands of years. It’s called fermentation.
The Covid pandemic reinforced the view in the public’s mind that microbes are dangerous. Repetitive hand washing, face masks, antibacterial wipes, and disinfectant gels became part of everyday life. But bacteria are not necessarily evil. In fact, many of the good things in life depend on microbial transformation to make food more delicious, more digestible, and more stable for storage. Think of bread, yoghurt, wine, pickles, cheese, soy sauce, and salami.
Almost all the world’s traditional diets include fermented products, as before refrigeration it was the only way to avoid food spoiling. Plants and vegetables are attuned to be in sync, flowering and fruiting at the same time to maximize the chances of fertilization and survival. Humans developed fermentation to cut across nature’s narrow abundance in time and make food available beyond its natural season. The recent boom in probiotic foods is an attempt to put back into our diet something that was always there historically: the good bacteria.
At the end of the 20th century, the internet blossomed in a burst of well-intentioned optimism with all the freedom and redolent possibilities of an open prairie.
This dream has soured as the negative effects of online bullying, spam, intrusive surveillance, fake news, fraudulent scamming, criminal hackers, and identity theft have come to the fore. For some, that hope-filled empty prairie seems to have been subverted and subdivided into siloed echo chambers of hate; a mirror held up to reflect all the worst traits of humanity. But, as with bacteria, there is good there too.
Cyber security conferences tend to emphasize the negatives and the looming threats. However, there are reasons to be cheerful. The Open Source Initiative, where individuals contribute their efforts for the common good, is still in rude health. White hat hackers continue to probe commercial software to expose vulnerabilities, which can then be swiftly patched.
The community responses to cyber incidents are becoming more coordinated. Industry groupings to share threat intelligence are also on the rise. Maybe it’s time to look on the bright side again…
