The world is saturated by services and products provided by companies that have a "secret grip" on the way we live. In 1951, the French-born American industrial designer Raymond Loewy described a typical day "of the average guy" from the moment he wakes up until he goes to bed. The point being that the average guy's life was saturated with designed products.

In 2024, the average person may be woken by an alarm on a smartphone, and benefit from hot water that is controlled by smart heating controls—also linked to a smartphone and the internet. There might be a delivery tracked via the internet and a ring on a doorbell also linked to the internet. Online banking links them to an array of financial services.

Our lives are increasingly dependent on being able to access what I have termed the "cyber-energy-production plexus". This "plexus" is basically an interwoven combination of elements that form a structure or a system. Regulating our modern lives, it needs to be "on" every second of the day.

It has formed around the multiple connections between telecommunications, energy, and manufacturing and service systems. It exposes everyone to unknown risks, including the sudden failure of the plexus and all the services coupled to it.

On July 19 2024, part of this plexus failed when the faulty CrowdStrike software update caused an outage, and the outcome was a minor digital pandemic across the world as the computer systems of whole industries came to a halt.

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