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If modern civilization is fragile, it is because we have made it so complicated. The more complicated you make any kind of system, the more opportunities you have for something to go wrong. Murphy's Law, pure and simple. I'm reminded of the scene from "Star Trek III" where Scotty disables the starship Excelsior by removing a single computer chip, and he says, "The more they outthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain."
On my job, the computer network was down for most of the past week, making it almost impossible to get anything useful done. In fact, the supervisor sent me home early on Monday for that reason. If that sort of problem had happened in the 1980s or early 90s, it wouldn't have made much of a difference.