Learning by Breaking

What market incentives discourage

The Notes social network on Substack turns out to be as time consuming to follow as it is to write. Notes stay within the Substack app, so the good news is that readers suffer no ads. Instead, Substack’s aim is to make money for investors, publishers, and authors alike by converting  more of the platform’s 35 million readers into paying for subscriptions to their favorite sites. If you liked Twitter (before it was X), you’ll love Notes.

Not me.  So, EP will continue to publish a short item weekly under its own flag, at least for a while, as I search for an appropriate format.

The trouble is that short items can be almost as hard to write as proper columns. They require  less of the working-through of the subject that is the author’s chief reward. Yet they are interesting in and of themselves. We link ’em, you read ’em.

Here’s a good example.  A friend sent me a blog post by Bruce Schneier, a  widely respected public-interest technologist, who works “at the intersection of security, technology, and people.” Inspired by the recent CrowdStrike catastrophe, Schneier’s  article was originally written for The New York Times, but was sidelined by the political news and published by Lawfare instead.

The brittleness of modern society isn’t confined to tech. We can see it in many parts of our infrastructure, from food to electricity, from finance to transportation. This is often a result of globalization and consolidation, but not always. In information technology, brittleness also results from the fact that hundreds of companies, none of which you’ve heard of, each perform a small but essential role in keeping the internet running. CrowdStrike is one of those companies.

This brittleness is a result of market incentives. In enterprise computing—as opposed to personal computing—a company that provides computing infrastructure to enterprise networks is incentivized to be as integral as possible, to have as deep access into their customers’ networks as possible, and to run as leanly as possible….

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.

If this were an EP column, it would have linked to Nobel laureate Bengt Holmström’s Nobel lecture on corporate multi-tasking, but it would have taken another day or to make sense of the connection. This item took too much time as it is. So we’ll see. If EP Lite finds a suitable format, voice, it will continue. If not, I’ll give up the weekly (again!) and stick to the monthly for paid subscribers only.