This is a good point, and I would add to it that the internet as a system is robust *because* the protocols are ancient and crufty and not too reliable. Ancient is antifragile! Real systemic risk lurks in the cloud—a complex system of cruft that is designed to never, ever fail.
https://twitter.com/rahaeli/status/1445267690466185216
There is an inverse relationship between severity and rarity. As services like AWS become better at containing imaginable failures, the ones that do make it through to affect the whole system will be wilder and weirder, and unplanned for by definition. Complexity always wins.
At the same time, people will treat any platform that demonstrates 99.9999% reliability as having 100% reliability, recursively in layer after layer, laying the seeds for cascading disaster when probability catches up with them. Think about the 2008 bank crisis as an example.
People saying the internet is a hairball held together with bubble gum and duct tape are paying it a huge compliment. Here and there inside the hairball is a delicately engineered Swiss watch, and those are the parts we need to get rid of.
Anyway this is all just the tech port of a standard-issue @nntaleb rant, except that I forgot to call anyone an asshole.
If you've seen a video of the Milk Crate Challenge, then you understand how the layered architecture of modern hardware, software, and the internet all works.
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