Redundancies are unprofitable. Being slow and careful is unprofitable. Being less embedded in and less essential and having less access to the customers’ networks and machines is unprofitable—at least in the short term, by which these companies are measured. This is true for companies like CrowdStrike. It’s also true for CrowdStrike’s customers, who also didn’t have resilience, redundancy, or backup systems in place for failures such as this because they are also an expense that affects short-term profitability.

The market rewards short-term profit-maximizing systems, and doesn’t sufficiently penalize such companies for the impact their mistakes can have. (Stock prices depress only temporarily. Regulatory penalties are minor. Class-action lawsuits settle. Insurance blunts financial losses.) It’s not even clear that the information technology industry could exist in its current form if it had to take into account all the risks such brittleness causes.

The asymmetry of costs is largely due to our complex interdependency on so many systems and technologies, any one of which can cause major failures. Each piece of software depends on dozens of others, typically written by other engineering teams sometimes years earlier on the other side of the planet. Some software systems have not been properly designed to contain the damage caused by a bug or a hack of some key software dependency.

This market force has led to the current global interdependence of systems, far and wide beyond their industry and original scope. It’s why flying planes depends on software that has nothing to do with the avionics. It’s why, in our connected internet-of-things world, we can imagine a similar bad software update resulting in our cars not starting one morning or our refrigerators failing.

Right now, the market incentives in tech are to focus on how things succeed: A company like CrowdStrike provides a key service that checks off required functionality on a compliance checklist, which makes it all about the features that they will deliver when everything is working. That’s exactly backward. We want our technological infrastructure to mimic nature in the way things fail. That will give us deep complexity rather than just surface complexity, and resilience rather than brittleness.

Netflix is famous for its Chaos Monkey tool, which intentionally causes failures to force the systems (and, really, the engineers) to be more resilient. The incentives don’t line up in the short term: It makes it harder for Netflix engineers to do their jobs and more expensive for them to run their systems. Over years, this kind of testing generates more stable systems. But it requires corporate leadership with foresight and a willingness to spend in the short term for possible long-term benefits.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration crashes cars to learn what happens to the people inside. But cars are relatively simple, and keeping people safe is straightforward. Software is different. It is diverse, is constantly changing, and has to continually adapt to novel circumstances. We can’t expect that a regulation that mandates a specific list of software crash tests would suffice. Again, security and resilience are achieved through the process by which we fail and fix, not through any specific checklist. Regulation has to codify that process.

Coping with things is the prevailing mood in my corner of the universe. As I write this, America has just completed an election in which many people voted primarily for the idea of voting. The prevailing candidate? Less an individual than an avatar of civility and liberalism.

We are a country founded on an idea and not an identity.

Americans have a way of obscuring reality through grand symbolism and none of the accompanying semiotic rigor. As if the facade of democracy can be upheld by not looking too closely at increasingly undemocratic outcomes — our high tolerance for multiculturalism tenuously predicated on everyone struggling equally. The difference between idea and identity is both our saving grace and our downfall. Democracy: watch the gap.

The idea of the American individual, part of the national optimism that fueled the Space Race, is far less prominent than the citizen-consumer. Attaining a degree of celebrity, still a coveted means to financial stability, thrusts one into the category of “celebrity,” where image overtakes personhood.

Lifestyle, like work, is something we can only see in aggregate. Technological gains don’t relieve the pressure for ownership; they merely reinforce it.