Our Increasingly Fragile World, or… Death Bed: The Bed That Eats People

Imagine a world where a distant actor can’t so readily turn your house upside down.

A colleague shared a link yesterday and we had a chuckle at another colleague’s expense about the Eight Sleep debacle which saw myriad sleep connoisseurs roasted and contorted by beds become monsters when AWS ground to a halt.

This recalled an old horror film that I only knew existed because another co-worker had loaned me a Patton Oswalt CD where he skewered it years ago — Deathbed: The Bed That Eats.

I empathize. AWS trashing the Internet every few years offers only the most obvious example of a rising risk in our tech ecosystem. Silver medal — CrowdStrike?

I live in a house replete with Philips Hue smart bulbs that improve my life, though now and again treat me to an infuriating failure mode. As fallback, cycling their power turns them into standard bulbs — great in a pinch when you want “dumb” lights at the flick of a switch, but decidedly less awesome when someone crashes a car into a power distribution station and sometime later you wake up thinking a tactical crew has tossed a flashbang into your bedroom. An even more complex failure, if less violent, ensues when my Internet connection fails, which causes my iPhone to disconnect from the WiFi when it declares “No Internet Connection”, leaving me unable to control my bulbs from my phone even though it only needs to talk to a fellow denizen of the local network.

A couple weeks ago I found myself at a campsite where my cell coverage alternated between nil and one bar. Few publicly available exercises exist to better remind you of the perils of excessive centralization coupled with assumptions about network throughput, latency, and ubiquity, though my time in the DoD yielded such opportunities were you willing to heed the regular laments of field agents about how headquarters screwed them by failing to realize that not everyone was just a hallway’s run of fiber optic cable away. Maybe crash your paraglider somewhere remote without a Garmin inReach for sat comms, imagining that your fragile and profligate smartphone will save you.

Far too often the “A” of “CIA”, “Availability”, gets short shrift in system design relative to “Confidentiality” and “Integrity”, as we worship at the altars of efficiency and convenience.

For all the present tariff and autarky hullabaloo I remain unconvinced that we durably internalized the fragility of our supply chains when the COVID pandemic struck. Every time I find myself marooned at a ski lodge with a smartphone that doesn’t work because of a road closure I imagine how terrifying a real disaster would prove. Whenever I can’t ship code to a perfectly functional AWS because of a completely broken GitHub or Atlassian I dream of simpler times while pondering the dwindling probability that the systems on which I rely will all work at the same time.

Can we have an adult conversation about caching, batching, layering, sequencing, prioritization, decentralization, and rolling deployments? Surely we are overdue.