I think there are many parallels between surviving in an increasingly virtual world that can be used to help wake people up to the realities of surviving in the physical world. As more aspects of our lives are digitized, many of the things that previously required physical storage (music, video, photos, documents) are now stored on hard drives or memory chips, either on physical devices that we control, or, increasingly, in the cloud. Thinking about what is involved in securing this important data is an enormously beneficial "survival" exercise, in my opinion. Especially since I don't see technology disappearing anytime soon, no matter how crappy things get.
The topic of digital backups, as well as computer and power redundancy, beautifully illustrates the whole concept of 2 is 1, and 1 is none. If all your data resides on a single physical drive, it's not backed up, because that drive is guaranteed to fail, probably when you can least afford to have it go down, and, when it does, your digital assets are gone. The loss could be on the order of the trivial, like the pictures from last weekends frat party, to the serious, such as critical business files that impact your ability to earn a living. The consensus now is that it's not really backed up until that data resides on two other drives, besides the main device, and one of those backups should reside off site, because if your house burns down and you lose the computer and backup drive, you're hosed. I usually have have 4 backups, two onsite and 2 on separate cloud sites.
Understanding password protection and the basics of encryption is a critical skill in safely managing and interacting with others in the digital world is. Yes, it's complicated and the math is hard, but you don't need to understand it at that level in order to use it effectively. I guess some would refer to it as "opsec" in the survival/prepper world, but I thinks it's just common sense. Why would you want anyone to know more about you and yours than you want them to know? Short of a "Revolution" style event, we will be in an IT world, for better or worse, for the duration. If we think it's bad now, we're just at the tip of the iceberg, and for every technological leap that makes our lives better, it will likely also represent another way for "them" to gain information about us, either in the abstract or the very specific. We disregard internet and related technology at our own peril. Look at what happened last week. The head of the freakin' CIA was incidentally caught with his pants down by an FBI investigation into what amounts to an email cat fight initiated by a woman jealous of his attention. That's freaky as hell! If the 4-star head of the CIA can't figure out how to manage his online personal life, just think where the rest of us are at.
My vision of the SHTF is probably a lot more boring than most. I don't really subscribe to the total system collapse apocalypse, not on a global or national scale, but certainly possible at the regional level for short periods. I'm more worried about a technologically advanced dystopia, where those who don't understand how to use technology will be increasingly at a disadvantage compared to those who do. Some will say that they'd rather go off the grid in this type of situation, but I wouldn't, and I think in many ways those returning to a peasant existence will find themselves at a disadvantage, and potentially even a target. Maybe that's the way to go, I don't know, but I don't see technology going away. The genie is out of the bottle and globally we have reached critical mass when it comes to our desire for and dependence on technology. Just look at the third world, where you've got people barely sophisticated enough to not poop in the same stream they get their water from, and they're using cell phones to better their lives. If an ass-backwards goatherd in a shit-hole like Afghanistan has cell service, what's the likelihood that we'll be digging out our ham sets and trying to figure out how to string together a bulletin board using HF? I just don't see it, but I guess time will tell.
