Drones are just the tip of the power that hackers can wield in our modern world

Assuming that there was, indeed, a drone at Gatwick Airport, what are we to learn? One chilling conclusion is that we are witnessing a new way to exercise power, one that has little precedent and that is likely to grow more common.

For most of history, coercive power was limited by the necessity of convincing other people to help you use it. Under feudalism, that sometimes meant convincing only a small group of people with access to weapons. But the proliferation of the musket, which allowed a rabble to become an army more quickly and cheaply than before, brought about a democratisation of military force that helped give birth to modern politics. From it sprung popular revolutions, national armies and the basic idea that rulers should be accountable to an armed “people” that finds its simplest expression in the American right to bear arms. As the techno-fascist philosopher Nick Land has said, “democracy smells of gunpowder”.

Today, though, technology allows the exercise of a different kind of power that does not require others to be convinced at all. When humankind discovered the computer, it summoned a demon, or perhaps a genie: something that perfectly executes the instructions it is given, even if the result exceeds its creators’ intentions. The Gatwick drone pilot had the same kind of power as a computer hacker, one not possessed by even the greatest medieval pope or Roman emperor, once open only to the holders of nuclear launch codes but now available to anyone with an internet connection and a sharp mind: the power to change the lives of thousands – millions – of people by having your instructions executed on a grand scale from almost anywhere in the world.

Take Paras Jha, a computer science student who last year pled guilty to creating the Mirai botnet. Mirai is a program that scanned for common vulnerabilities in online devices such as printers and webcams and enlisted them into a kind of zombie army. Many such botnets are still operating today: your computer probably bats off an attack by one every five minutes. In 2016 Mirai caused chaos, but Mr Jha’s motives were petty: he wanted to delay the registration deadline for a course he hoped to take, and then to delay his calculus exam.

Paradoxically, lone hackers such as Jha are only able to cause such outsize trouble because of vast systems that are far bigger than any one person. Mirai could not have happened without a global market that delivered millions of online devices with lax security into people’s homes. The affair of the Gatwick drone would not have been possible without an internet connection, a power grid, GPS satellites and the finely balanced lacework of the global travel system.

But controlling such events – or cyber-security – is rarely actually about stopping people from doing things. It is about letting some people wield the power you want to give them without also inadvertently letting other people usurp that power. Most hacking is about pretending to be an authorised user, claiming legitimate boons illegitimately. The same is true of all the

at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion fruits of industrial society. It’s not really possible to give millions of people light, electricity and data without also giving some of them the power to abuse it. And since we’re not willing to shut the system down, we (imperfectly) tighten security and keep it running.

In a way, then, cyber-power still requires convincing people; it’s just that you only need to convince them to keep living in the 21st century. With that (barely conscious) decision made, power becomes not about persuasion but authentification, whether legitimate or faked. It means holding the right key for the right lock, or knowing the rules well enough to manipulate them as if you had such a key. That is what hackers do and what the drone pilot did by turning a remote device into a kind of crowbar jammed into the most vulnerable part of our transport network.

The flipside is that this new power also benefits governments. The democratic military era arguably ended in 1945 with the first atom bomb. But even nukes were dogged by the fear (or hope) that a human might refuse to press the button when ordered to. Soldiers need to be convinced and motivated to shoot civilians. Autonomous weapons do not, and as long as their power is not cut they would be absolutely in thrall to the holder of their keys. No wonder so much hacking is done by states.

If all this is true, we are entering an era in which the resistance of the masses is no longer a meaningful brake on the ability of key-holders to project power – except, perhaps, for the ability of key-fakers to disrupt it. Since that is a little bit like hoping nuclear war can be prevented by letting hobbyists make nukes in their garden sheds, it is not a tremendous comfort.

At this time of year, the false religion of excess is often exchanged for the equally false religion of abstention. Gym memberships are entered into with all good faith – only to be cast aside like stale mince pies by March. Dry January is embarked upon, before ending in a boozy blowout come February 1.

Frankly, as well as being philosophically irking, I find it personally puzzling that people can make such a performance out of cutting back on a bit of sugar or laying off the booze, because three years ago, after three decades of taking cocaine three times a day, I gave it up literally overnight.

There was no specific reason – I hadn’t reached the famous “rock bottom” which we are told all addicts have to find themselves in before they can scramble back up the scree. I still had most of my teeth, marbles and money. And I can’t say I “lost” a huge part of my life to drugs because my most successful writing years – both financially and creatively – were also my most copious cocaine decades.

I quit because I noticed that drugs – like alcohol and like pornography – are an optical illusion, appearing to open life up, while actually making it smaller, until one day you realise that, where once life held a smorgasbord of possibilities, all it has room for is you and your comfort blanket, ricocheting around a rat run of your own design.

I didn’t replace drugs with clean

In the computer, humankind summoned a demon, or perhaps a genie: something that perfectly executes the instructions it is given, even if the result exceeds its creators’ intentions

I quit because I noticed that drugs – like alcohol and like pornography – are an optical illusion, appearing to open life up, while actually making it smaller

at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion living, as others do (I’m still a shocking drunkard on a spree) because I lack the zeal and guilt involved in such extreme conversions. Instead, I took up Stoicism.

The writings of a band of privileged Greeks and Romans living between the 3rd century BC and the 3rd century AD might not seem a likely substitute for the notso-cheap thrills of a central nervous stimulant. Nevertheless, they have given me real insights into the life that drugs appear to be offering – namely, that taking coke is actually just putting off the day when you finally have to wake up and look at yourself.

The things that I have got, and continued to get the most constant kick from over the past three years – my volunteer job, my Hebrew language class – couldn’t have happened to me during my cocaine decades, demanding as they do a certain discipline. But they are supported by the Stoic idea that starting and sticking at a thing rather than just talking about it is the surest route to happiness.

To become a Stoic after a lifetime as a hedonist could be seen as just another highfalutin’ twist on the New Year, New You foolishness. But the difference is that because the Stoic life can be lived, rather than just fantasised about (no one ever says, “In the summer, when I’m a Stoic” but lots of self-deluders say, “In the summer, when I’m slim” or “In the summer, I’ll start my book”), to take it up is an easy, free and truly effective way of changing one’s life. All it needs is the grasping of a simple truth to get started – that we are what we do today, not what we say we’ll do tomorrow.