The internet is integrated into virtually every aspect of life

The sheer amount of gold in Fort Knox was so great that Auric Goldfinger, the villain of the 1964 James Bond film which carries his name, knew he could not simply steal it: instead he planned to use a nuclear device to irradiate it, destroying its value and thus increasing that of his own reserves. Casing the facilities of equivalent strategic worth to the world today—the hyperscale data centres of Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft—suggests that something almost as dramatic would be needed to take them down. They are fortresses with layer after layer of protection, from fences to airlock-style entrances to biometric scanners.