Preface: So Far, so Bad – the Complexity-Fear Dilemma in Cybersecurity and Its Lesson for Digitalization at Large

Abstract

The new waves of the ongoing digital revolution are certainly of high importance to everyone. New markets are created in a highly dynamic fashion, with the industrialized West and its backbone of technology manufacturers undergoing fundamental changes in the coming years, and new products flood our lives, whether directly as consumer goods or, a step before that, as baseline technologies, infrastructures, production machinery, new cars, new drug pumps, new reactors, parts of our formerly dumb and blind environment of “old tech”. In sum, businesses and technologies in Germany and Europe are faced with enormous options for change – and their according sets of opportunities and threats.

Yet while everyone agrees that something great and, in a business sense, oceanic is under way, the question whether we will master this change and benefit from it, economically and individually, is somehow open. All commercial benefactors from industry captain to startup hipster agree, of course, that they do or will master this new surge in digitalization. And most of them, to be fair, try hard. But is it really enough? And do they try in the right way?

These questions are very hard to answer. Success is difficult to measure, at any rate, and many paradigms are young and technically inasmuch as commercially still in their infancy. However, we may be able to learn some lessons from other fields of IT with more history to them.