My friend Anthony Townsend has written about "The Shame of Boston's Wireless Woes," and what the failure of the city's cellphone networks after the marathon bombing tells us about the state of a system that we rely upon so completely.

"It didn't take government fiat to shut down the cellular networks," he notes, despite rumors to the contrary. "They fell apart all on their own." So why do they fail?

The culprit is usually congestion. During a disaster, call volumes spike and overwhelm the over-subscribed capacity of wireless carriers' networks. On September 11, 2001, fewer than 1 in 20 mobile phone calls in New York City was connected. The same thing happened after the August 2011 earthquake that shook the East Coast. And on Monday, in Boston.

But, as we learned in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, wireless carriers have also neglected to harden their networks against extended losses of electrical power. Thousands of towers were knocked offline in the New York region alone when backup batteries failed. Yet as a member of Governor Andrew Cuomo's NYS Ready Commission this fall, I was stunned to learn that wireless carriers had never formally discussed plans with the region's electric utilities to restore power to cell sites after a major disaster.

The loss of vital wireless communications during disasters is all the more dismaying because it is largely preventable…. In the wake of Sandy, New York Senator Charles Schumer called for stricter federal oversight of backup power and landline network connections for cell sites.

Despite posting record profits, "these reforms have been stalled by industry lobbying."

Of course.

But for me, this is the insight that jumps out:

Our smart phones keep our complicated lives choreographed across the sprawling metropolitan areas we inhabit. Psychologists and sociologists have found that we think of these devices as extensions of our bodies and minds. In Boston, this was all too apparent. Even when runners, whose mobile
batteries were drained after the long run, could locate a phone, they
couldn't recall what numbers to dial, having long ago given up
memorizing phone numbers in favor of their smart phone's electronic
address book.

Despite our utter dependency on cellular networks, the industry has
failed to act substantially to improve the reliability of these systems… These companies have sold American consumers a digital
lifeline without honoring their responsibility to assure it works at our
time of greatest need.

This is one of the bigger challenges we face as a consequence of incorporating networked technologies into our extended selves: it creates a dependence on the operators of those networks and their policies that should always leave us uncomfortable. Throughout most of human history, our best and deepest entanglements with technologies have allowed us to extend our abilities, express ideas we otherwise could not, help us become new and better people, and create lives that have meaning.

But those technologies have been– or have had the potential to be– completely under our control. The warrior's sword, the smith's anvil and hammer, the farmer's plow, the scientist's notebook, the musician's instrument, all demand practice and attention, but they don't have wills or policies of their own. (Sorry, Kevin Kelly.)

In contrast, smartphones and the Web are more like prosthetics that we can't always control– not just because they're poorly designed (lots of them are), but because their makers continue– through upgrades, interface tweaks, collection of user data, and policies– to be able to direct their actions. Imagine if you had a robotic arm, but whenever you reached for the glass of water it would steer toward a bottle of soda, or a bicycle that tried to steer you to fast-food drive-through windows.

This is, in effect, the situation we put ourselves in. Of course, many companies will argue that there's no problem, and no possible regulatory solution that won't be obsolete by the time it's implemented. However, it seems increasingly clear that without some forceful nudging, phone companies will focus on making their service is more addictive, and not "honoring their responsibility to assure it works at our
time of greatest need."