Once a huge champion of all things digital, I’ve come to develop serious doubts about the pace at which humanity made the switch from analogue to the cloud. The hackings, outages, data breaches, and extended breakages all make the point. Then it dawned on me that the danger is even greater. 

Most of the things we use today have not been stress tested. They are centralized and have a single point of failure. And they are very vulnerable. It could all stop in an instant with no sure guarantee of when it will come back. 

A turning point came for me visiting a small basement laundry in Manhattan. The proprietor was still using a sewing machine from 1948. She would have nothing to do with newer models. After that, I took greater notice of the machinery of other merchants in my area. Many sewing machines were 75 years old and still working well. My cobbler uses equipment more than a century old. This is not uncommon.