Bridges collapse; police go corrupt; electricity has outages; gasoline suffers price shocks; governments have a 100% failure rate; an 1870s-style solar flare would send us back to medieval times.
All we can do is:
A. Diversify, under the belief nothing is infallible; and even perfect engineering can experience catastrophic failure
B. Enjoy what we have today, knowing it is a gift, not a right
Also, while we blame CrowdStrike, let’s not forget that SSH was within weeks of being backdoored on a global scale. The power that would have unleashed (and proxy power, I.e. breaking into CloudStrike and then Windows by extension) very well could have ended the internet.
> All infrastructure is fragile and always will be.
No, and it doesn't need to be. We can build redundancy on every level. We can plan for failure and prepare for contingencies. We alwas need a plan B (and C and D for critical services). Will it be efficient or cheap? Of course not - we'd be building two for the price of two, but being sure that, when one fails, we have a redundant one to catch the fall of civilization.
We can't just optimize away every gram of safety and hope everything goes to plan (as they did in this case). Hope is not a strategy.
I wouldn't say fragile. A bit of Roman stuff is still functional today. The pyramids are holding up too. Cathedrals also have a massive stability streak. The stuff that has been falling over is mostly brick, steel, and concrete. And that's due to lack of required maintenance. I could even use the opposite word to describe them: strong and solid.
And plenty of cathedrals collapsed without proper maintenance, or were destroyed by invaders, or had their stones taken by locals for use in building. All it took was a spark in the wrong place to destroy Notre Dame.
Not if you actually look. Romans invented a concrete recipe that was lost for a millennium. Their ports were holding together longer than any modern concrete. This Roman concrete recipe was recently rediscovered and has been getting traction again.
Bridges collapse; police go corrupt; electricity has outages; gasoline suffers price shocks; governments have a 100% failure rate; an 1870s-style solar flare would send us back to medieval times.
All we can do is:
A. Diversify, under the belief nothing is infallible; and even perfect engineering can experience catastrophic failure
B. Enjoy what we have today, knowing it is a gift, not a right
Also, while we blame CrowdStrike, let’s not forget that SSH was within weeks of being backdoored on a global scale. The power that would have unleashed (and proxy power, I.e. breaking into CloudStrike and then Windows by extension) very well could have ended the internet.