"The purpose behind terrorism is to instill fear in people - the fear that electrical power, for instance, will be taken away or the transportation system will be taken down"
About this Quote
Cerf’s line is striking because it refuses the cinematic mythology of terrorism as pure spectacle and drags it into the bland, brittle infrastructure of everyday life. He doesn’t name ideology, religion, or even violence; he names dependencies. Electrical power. Transportation. The ordinary systems so reliable we only notice them when they fail. That’s the point: modern fear isn’t just about bodily harm, it’s about losing the invisible scaffolding that lets daily life pretend it’s stable.
Coming from an internet pioneer, the emphasis on systems reads like a worldview. Cerf thinks in networks, nodes, cascading failures. Terrorism, in this framing, is less a battlefield tactic than an attack on public confidence in continuity. The “for instance” is doing quiet work: it implies the list is long, expandable, and unnervingly practical. If the grid can go, so can banking, communications, hospitals, supply chains. The sentence invites the reader to run that mental simulation and feel the anxiety bloom.
The subtext is also political: fear is cheaper than destruction. You don’t have to permanently cripple a society to change its behavior; you just have to make disruption feel plausible. That plausibility is amplified in a high-tech, tightly coupled world where efficiency creates single points of failure. Cerf’s context likely sits in the post-9/11 era and the rise of cyberwar and infrastructure vulnerability, when “terror” increasingly meant not just bombs, but the threat of systemic interruption. His quote functions as a warning against treating terrorism as a distant other; it’s a pressure applied to the switches we all share.
Coming from an internet pioneer, the emphasis on systems reads like a worldview. Cerf thinks in networks, nodes, cascading failures. Terrorism, in this framing, is less a battlefield tactic than an attack on public confidence in continuity. The “for instance” is doing quiet work: it implies the list is long, expandable, and unnervingly practical. If the grid can go, so can banking, communications, hospitals, supply chains. The sentence invites the reader to run that mental simulation and feel the anxiety bloom.
The subtext is also political: fear is cheaper than destruction. You don’t have to permanently cripple a society to change its behavior; you just have to make disruption feel plausible. That plausibility is amplified in a high-tech, tightly coupled world where efficiency creates single points of failure. Cerf’s context likely sits in the post-9/11 era and the rise of cyberwar and infrastructure vulnerability, when “terror” increasingly meant not just bombs, but the threat of systemic interruption. His quote functions as a warning against treating terrorism as a distant other; it’s a pressure applied to the switches we all share.
Quote Details
| Topic | Fear |
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