The software designed by the company CDK was completely disabled, affecting the whole of an integrated process of purchasing and processing. Sellers could not process sales, loans, insurance, registrations, and much more. It happened suddenly, lasted two and a half days, came back, then went down again.

How did car dealers function? They wrote it all out on paper and pledged to complete the process after the systems came back. They are back and all seems well but the experience is a warning sign. These systems are far more vulnerable than anyone normally assumes. All it takes to shut down the modern world as we know it is a hack here and there. That's an alarming realization.

The problem is that the technological revolution as we fashioned it 30 years ago gradually evolved in an ever more centralized way, wholly dependent on a weak and old-fashioned electrical grid of networks without much duplication or backstopping. The software too has become centralized for each industrial purpose. If one thing goes wrong in any system with a single point of failure, the whole comes to a grinding halt.

It's amazing to consider that the old analogue world that lasted from the ancient world until the 21st century did not have this problem. It was more durable, physically anchored, fixable by human hands, comprehensible, and manageable. The move to digital everything introduced a fragility to the whole that we are only now discovering.

This is not only a problem for whole industries. It affects individuals too. A friend of mine recently came back to his car to discover that his iPad had snapped and curled up as a crumpled piece of metal in the heat, something completely unexpected. The same day, the screen on his laptop split from top to bottom, likely due to some physical impact. Bad luck but out of nowhere, his life came to a grinding halt, left only with a phone that was on its last legs anyway.