Using the wife's computer for this post...

Highly complex and evolving systems can usually generate many work-arounds and alternatives to continue functioning (although perhaps at reduced efficiency) after severe damage or constant stress. Think of the biosphere or climate, rain forests or coral reefs--or even Nazi Germany, somehow managing to continue boosting war production almost to the end of '44, in spite of severe damage and constant attack.

But our obsession with maximizing profit and efficiency and eliminating redundancy also tends to reduce backups and robustness. Sooner or later, we will find a bottleneck which cannot be sidestepped or bypassed or jury-rigged, such as a reliance on electrical energy, fossil fuels or computational power. Pull the plug there and a mode change occurs, followed by gridlock and catastrophic runaway collapse.

In order to avoid this type of cascade failure, we wind up throwing more and more resources into our purely administrative systems, making THEM ever more complex and vulnerable and inefficient. But the bigger and more elaborate we build our fortresses, the more opportunities arise for the besiegers, both human and entropic, to breach our defenses.

The hackers who maliciously vandalize our vital computer systems are actually warning us how desperately dependent we are on them, and how vulnerable they are to attack. And they are also reminding us how helpless we are when faced with our dependence on the castles we have erected to protect ourselves.

For want of nail...