What will the Global Accident look like? Ex-White House staffer Richard Clarke thinks that coordinated hack attacks by China could bring the USA to bankruptcy and social disaster within 15 minutes. But it’s not necessary to posit a cyber-war in order to imagine disaster engulfing the world within a very short time frame. The complex global interdependencies of military supply lines, oil refineries, electrical grids, server farms, air-traffic control systems and orbital satellites mean that if any one of these critical nodes is damaged, a chain reaction of negative effects could be triggered, with the world spiralling into chaos. This is the Global Accident as ‘butterfly effect’. One day, the lights go out, the internet fails, cash machines come up empty and planes start falling from the skies. For more on Clarke’s scenario, see http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/04/cyberwar-richard-clarke/