Market-Driven Brittleness ⇥ lawfaremedia.org

Barath Raghavan and Bruce Schneier, Lawfare:

Today’s internet systems are too complex to hope that if we are smart and build each piece correctly the sum total will work right. We have to deliberately break things and keep breaking them. This repeated process of breaking and fixing will make these systems reliable. And then a willingness to embrace inefficiencies will make these systems resilient. But the economic incentives point companies in the other direction, to build their systems as brittle as they can possibly get away with.

This is a tremendous essay — a call to action in opposition to the shallow cost-effectiveness embraced by corporations up and down the high technology chain. Now all we need is to hope businesses do things which are not in their immediate financial interest.