15. Measuring the Problem

Now put a number on it.

The last chapter ended on a question: how big is this, really? This chapter's first job is to answer it, with the largest and best-sourced numbers that exist. We measure to see how total the thing has become, how industrial, how rational; and we measure because the scale is the argument. A reader can wave away "the attacker controls the artifact and the artifact is free." It is harder to wave away forty-three and a half million removed communities, or twenty billion dollars in reported losses, in a single year. But the chapter's second job is the more important one: explaining why almost every figure you will encounter, including the ones in this book, is measuring something other than what it appears to measure.

We have spent four parts describing a phenomenon — its history, its economics, its tools, its battlegrounds — mostly in qualitative terms, because the qualitative shape is what matters and because the people best positioned to count are the people least incentivized to count honestly. But a worldview that cannot survive contact with the data is not a worldview; it is a mood. The goal of this chapter is not to leave you with a number. The goal is to leave you able to read any future number and know immediately what it is hiding.