Josephine Wolff

Just as our public health system appears unable to cope with the spread of the coronavirus, our residential broadband, video conferencing platforms and VPNs are about to face unprecedented strain. That strain will have serious consequences, not just for the performance of our broadband networks but also for student access to education and the security of corporate data and networks. The performance issues might be worse in rural areas, where internet service is already less reliable than it is in big cities.

“Now the cyber is so big,” Donald Trump said at an appearance in Virginia. It was part of a longer, equally incoherent statement about “cyber,” which, according to him, “is... becoming something that a number of years ago, short number of years ago, wasn’t even a word.” Of course, that’s not strictly true—cyber has been around for a while now, as both a noun and a prefix used in all manner of contexts and ways ranging from online sex to all-out apocalypse (or cyberpocalypse, if you will). Still, there’s something about that particular construction—“the cyber”—that feels off, like it’s either missing a word (“now the cyberthreat is so big”) or has an extra definite article (“now cyber is so big”).

Many of us are still wrestling with the idea of cyber as a noun rather than an adjective, though Trump is hardly the first to use it that way. (See, for instance, this summer, when NATO announced that it would extend its operations to the cyberdomain and the AP headline touted the change as “air, land, sea, cyber.”) But while that expansion into new parts of speech is intellectually interesting, it isn’t nearly as troubling as the sense that the more we invoke the term cyber in a general manner, the less we have any clear idea what it means or what we’re actually talking about.