The CrowdStrike Debacle is a Warning

We have engineered social systems that are hyper-optimized, super efficient, but incredibly fragile. It's a mistake—and unless we fix it, we will careen toward much worse, utterly avoidable disasters.

Thank you for reading The Garden of Forking Paths. This edition is free, but you can unlock dozens more articles and access the full archive of 130+ articles by upgrading to a paid subscription for just $4/month. I rely exclusively on reader support. You can also support my work by buying my new book, FLUKE.

---

Our world, more than ever before, pivots on the tiniest details of a chaotic world.

Eight days ago, a bullet narrowly missed Donald Trump during a rally in Pennsylvania. It was immediately obvious that the 21st century would have been profoundly different but for a gust of wind, a twitch of the trigger finger, or one man’s tilt of his head. We will never know how the world would be different—we only have one Earth to observe—but nobody believes that everything would unfold the same way this century if the bullet had found its mark.

The most common cognitive mistake is to believe that only certain moments—like a failed assassination of a high-profile politician—are producing forking paths in our societies and our lives. Instead, the world is constantly diverging, new paths being forged, by the smallest contingencies of often unnoticed flukes.

However, social systems can evolve over time to be more or less contingent—more or less fragile—and we have, unfortunately, created a world that is more prone to the unpredictable volatility of chaotic dynamics than ever before.

On Friday, a single botched update from one company created a global crisis, shutting down critical infrastructure everywhere, all at once. For the billions of people who had never heard of CrowdStrike, it was a crash course in a disturbing fact: much of our world runs on software from companies that, when they make a mistake, can bring down the fundamental systems that run our world, from travel to banking and healthcare. A tiny local mistake can now be amplified into a dystopian global cascade—and we are lucky that this debacle wasn’t much worse.

But it’s not just digital platforms. Our endless worship at the Altar of Endless Optimization, in which we aim to squeeze every last drop of inefficiency out of our social systems, is making us more prone to disaster. Our world too often runs like a crusade against the very forms of mildly inefficient slack that make systems resilient. And we are careening toward disaster.

CrowdStrike was a warning. It’s up to us whether we are jolted out of our complacency—or if we just decide to foolishly white knuckle it and hope that the inevitable calamities of the future don’t wallop us in highly predictable ways.

As readers of The Garden of Forking Paths are well aware, I’ve been banging the drum of contingency and catastrophic risk for a long time, not least in Fluke. In today’s edition of The Atlantic, I wrote a piece about the CrowdStrike meltdown, which you, dear readers, can access for free because I am a benevolent creature who has provided you with a magical gift link which makes it free to read, complete with this cool artwork.

Here’s an excerpt of the article:

There is often a trade-off between maximum optimization and resilience. Consider a rudimentary prehistorical social system in which many humans lived in small, isolated bands. They would never interact with other groups of humans hundreds, let alone thousands, of miles away. What any single person did would have little to no effect on those living elsewhere. It was an inefficient, basic system—but if one part of the human system failed, few others were affected.

Throughout our advancement as a species, from building empires to building machines, social systems have evolved to be more connected and centralized. Eventually, an emperor or a king could make a decision in a far-flung palace, and it would soon affect the lives of potentially millions of people. By the Industrial Revolution, trade routes and supply lines had become global. Disaster in one region could upend economies far away. This connectivity and coordination produced unprecedented innovation and prosperity. It was efficient. But it also amplified social risk.

In the 21st century, the combination of globalization and digitization has created a landscape characterized by the threat of catastrophic, instantaneous risk. Globalization enables large efficiency gains, as with just-in-time manufacturing, where a product can be assembled from carefully managed links in the global supply chain. But those systems lack resilience. Every link must fit together perfectly; the system falls apart if even one chain breaks. (This fragility became obvious when one boat blocked the Suez Canal in 2021, causing enormous damage to the global economy.)

Similarly, digital connectivity has unlocked significant innovations. But it has also meant that much of the world’s core operations rely on a tiny subset of companies and the software they develop. A few days ago, most people had never heard of CrowdStrike; now it’s impossible to ignore how many of our most basic forms of social infrastructure are stacked on top of sometimes precarious bits of computer code. It should bewilder us all that the structures  governing our lives were just fixed using a method only slightly more sophisticated than “Have you tried turning it off and on again?”

…

Centuries ago, the philosopher David Hume wrote that we can never be certain that the patterns of the past will remain the patterns of the future. As I argue in my book Fluke, this is especially true in the 21st century. We are gambling more and more of our world on unstable, volatile systems. Worse, we’re gambling with higher stakes in a time of social upheaval and structural change. Can we really trust our species to flawlessly govern unimaginably complex systems—systems we don’t always fully understand—that can be brought down by a single screw-up?

Unfortunately, every aspect of power in modern society rewards optimization rather than resilience. CEOs prioritize Q3 profits over long-term sustainability. Politicians rarely get rewarded for long-term investments in averting potential disaster (see, for example, the world’s unpreparedness for a global pandemic that experts had warned, for decades, was a significant possibility). For our part, we must demand that our leaders think more about lasting stability than short-term sugar highs.

A good maxim to guide us is this: Slightly more efficient systems that might someday fail catastrophically are a bad bet for humanity.

If you’re interested in this general topic, I’ve also written in previous editions of The Garden of Forking Paths about our misguided obsession with ever-greater efficiency in The Red Queen Fallacy; and on the perils of trying to “moneyball” everything in a world increasingly defined by “Calvinball” dynamics.

Let’s hope that the CrowdStrike moment—which could have been far worse—triggers a bit of introspection at the highest levels of power and that the 21st century is increasingly defined by a bit more careful attention to fail-safes, backups, and more emphasis on decentralized risk management so that a failing node can be isolated rather than taking down entire realms of our social world in a devastating instant.

Thank you for reading The Garden of Forking Paths. I’ll be back, barging into your inbox later this week, with a special pre-Olympics edition about the evolution of sports and why so many of us—myself included—irrationally surrender our mood and parts of our identity to the ability of adult strangers to run fast or kick a ball into a net or whack a ball with a stick.