The weird logic of modern failures
Rules stifle our thinking and make us lazy. Be careful.
Consider, for instance, the day Europe’s busiest airport1—Heathrow, naturally—plunged into silence; its operations were halted not by a storm or a strike but by a fire in an electrical substation.
Not just any substation, mind you, North Hyde substation, nestled in light industrial land in Hayes, an unremarkable exurb of London. The fictional character Ali G is a local. Hayes’ power network has been stressed for a while under the strain of population growth and its proximity to Britain’s data centre corridor. All these pressures were well known.2
The transformers, capacitors, circuit breakers and other gubbins that lay on this site, a bit bigger than a football pitch, formed the sole lifeline, the heart, it is fair to say, powering this paragon of modernity: London’s Heathrow Airport.
I can hear you all asking yourselves: such a critical facility, surely, didn’t have a single point of failure?
It’s 2025 after all, we’ve learnt not to put all our eggs in one basket.
Apparently, not the bosses who oversee the airport: “It’s never happened before, and that’s why I’m saying it has been a major incident.”
Of course, this isn’t true. Single points of failure are well known. That is why you don’t put all your eggs in one basket. That is why the Space Shuttle had four backup computers. That is why my home has two different Internet connections.
Heads should roll pdq, but that is an aside.
But ultimately, it is an oddity that beggars belief: how did such a vastly important piece of infrastructure, with well-known vulnerabilities, come to rely on the engineers equivalent of a twig? This is just weird.
But not unforeseen
A decade ago, I chanced upon an essay by a prodigious British software engineer
titled, “The world will only get weirder.”He posited that this phenomenon is the inevitable byproduct of the interaction of rule-making and a complex society.
Coast’s central argument hinges on the diminishing returns of rules.
We’ve adeptly mitigated commonplace calamities—think mechanical failures in aviation—through a labyrinth of regulations. Consequently, the residual risks are increasingly esoteric, manifesting as bizarre tail events, such as pilots deliberately downing their aircraft.
Yet, this regulatory zeal is not without its ironies. The very measures intended to safeguard can engender unforeseen perils. Consider the locked cockpit doors, a post-9/11 innovation that, while thwarting hijackers, inadvertently empowered a rogue pilot to barricade himself within.
Time spent managing rules is time people don't spend exchanging ideas or coming up with new stuff, or just spotting the blindingly obvious.
Domains emancipated from regulatory shackles—software and the internet spring to mind—often burgeon with innovation and economic vitality. These “rule-free zones” serve as crucibles for experimentation, yielding societal dividends when their ventures bear fruit. We probably need more of them.
Unweirdness norms
I think there is another dimension to this. Living in a sanitised, largely unweird world, a dependable world, makes most of us blasé to risk, to weirdness. It’s perhaps why many people feel odd trying to describe their risk tolerance in sensible terms to their financial advisor. And it’s probably why the best investors in the world, Buffett, Marks, Singer or Dalio, are renowned for their risk management and their respect for the weird.
Our society is so good at excising edge cases that we can’t believe they exist. Engineers, safety analysts, and regulators, in their quest to cocoon us from catastrophe, have inadvertently obscured the lurking specters of systemic fragility.