My sewing stash is a thing of wonder. (All sewing stashes are.) There are bits, bobs, buttons, bows, and books spanning all my life and all its travels: far more tiny items than I could ever count, much less use, and that’s how I like it. But there’s one item in there which shouldn’t be in there, and which truly amazed me. It snuck its way in by chance: I found it in a mystery bag of random mid-20th century paper patterns which I bought in a store clearance. You can see a photo above.

It’s a fragile piece of tissue paper, and nothing more, from a French womens’ magazine which contained sewing and needlework patterns. The pattern itself is an alphabet of garish art deco monograms which only a Jay Gatsby could love. Not my thing. But what stunned me was the date in the lower left corner:

Mon dieu.

In March 1940 in Paris, the war seemed far away and the women of Paris were shopping for fashion. Two months later, the Germans were in France. One month after that, the Germans were parading down the Champs Élysées.

And they had no clue any of that was coming, and so they bought their fashion magazines and their haberdashery.

In that way, a sliver of tissue paper becomes an artefact of an astounding moment in time. And for me, a provocation. You see, not all of the women of Paris had their heads in the clouds. I don’t think I would have been the kind of Parisian woman buying high fashion patterns that March, thinking that those things far away would never touch me. I would have been the kind of Parisian woman doing other things, in far less glamorous places, as if those things far away were already there.

So.

If I was placing this object lesson in front of you for a reason, and if you were a smart person, you might start to contemplate what you’d do, if you saw something in the distance, barreling towards you, fast; and like the smarter women of Paris, you’d started planning your strategies in advance. Yes, their lives were analogue, and yours are digital. But has anything really changed in that time? Perhaps not.

Step one, the first thing you might want to do, is evaluate your security at the personal, family, household, and community level. Take the time, now while you can, to harden all four security areas. End-to-end encryption, first and foremost. Security of your IOT devices, cars, whatnot, second. Your online privacy, including the information held about you by data brokers, third. All of the same, above, for your family members, fourth, and that includes your children and parents. The safety and security of your physical home and immediate local surroundings, if not your entire community, sixth. 

Step two, only after you’re confident that you and your immediate circle are braced for impact, is to widen that circle to the people in your networks who might be considered the first targets. They will need your advocacy, very soon. First, they need your protection. You are clever enough – and technically competent enough too – to provide it.

And step three, you need to make sure that the project, organisation, or employer you work for is looking after people too: not just you, but your users. Shift your thinking right now. Proactively identify people who use your technology, or rely on your advocacy, to achieve the protection we talked about in step one. Pivot your thinking to offensive and defensive tactics. That means that as organisations and as individuals, you might want to prepare to have very different public and private personas.

A bit like the smarter women of Paris in 1940: the ones who were clever enough to buy a silly fashion magazine on the way home from getting up to good trouble. Because with one of those in your hands, no one would have suspected a thing.