Chaos and Resilience

The 2020s may well end up being remembered as a decade of chaos. Approximately every three years in the decade so far, we’ve faced a new crisis with global implications. This is our new normal - and we need to learn to develop resilience in the face of the chaos inherent on our complex systems.

In 2020, COVID-19 overturned our expectations of how life could change, and reinforced how important supply chains are – and how fragile they can be. In 2022/3, the outbreak of the Ukraine war exposed the vulnerabilities in many countries’ energy and food supplies. And now, in 2026, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz is giving us the second energy shock of the decade – and threatening to ground flights over the summer period. At the time of writing. Lufthansa is the first airline to make it clear that flights will be cancelled over shortages of aviation fuel.

OK, so maybe travelling might get harder – or more expensive – for a while. Surely, we can do what we did last time, and pivot online?

Well, that might be more difficult than you remember. In the early part of the pandemic, there was a run on webcams and microphones. Demand shot up, supply stayed stable, or decreased. The rest is simple economics.

Serious RAMifications

But this time around, we’re already facing a technology shortage. The demand for chips and RAM from the burgeoning AI industry is rapidly reversing the “cheap and available” tech world we’ve become used to. RAM shortages are causing products to be cancelled, and demand from AI enthusiasts is making some products unavailable, as the parts to make them are scarce.

Take, for example, Valve, whose hit product the Steam Deck is largely out of stock:

While the Steam Deck has had its moment to shine before shortages kicked in, this spells doom for everything else Valve has coming — the Steam Machine, Steam Frame and Steam Controller.
In a blog post, the gaming giant revealed that its console-like PC, VR headset and gaming controller have been delayed to the “first half of the year,” as opposed to Q1 of 2026. And yes, it's due to “memory and storage shortages.”

AI hungers for data, power – and tech

I’m feeling it personally. My six-year-old iMac is on its last legs, and I want to replace it with a Mac mini. The monitor? Easy. I could have it on my desk tomorrow. The computer itself? Much, much harder. They cannot be had for love nor money – at least within the next couple of months:

This week, reports indicated that the $599 M4 Mac mini base model with 16GB RAM and 256GB of storage is sold out on Apple’s retail website, with no options for delivery or in-store pickup. The shortages have since extended to other configurations of the base model, regardless of the amount of memory selected. This is the first time the base model has been sold out, some outlets noted. Meanwhile, models with higher storage (512GB and up) are only available to ship starting in June.

Why? They’re the preferred device for running on device AI models like OpenClaw at home. And that means what was always a niche product from Apple is seeing demand from buyers like never before. The BBC covered how deeply OpenClaw has become established in China in a matter of months, and it’s spreading among the tech-forward globally.

Hello, permacrisis, my old friend

As the picture emerges, it appears a familiar one. Yes, this is yet another face of the permacrisis. Or, to put it another way, the permacrisis an inevitable result of the potential for chaos in our complex, global economy and infrastructure.

It’s chaotic because multiple crises are interacting through vast networks of interconnected systems in ways that are difficult to predict. While the fuel crisis doesn’t directly impact the tech crisis, shipping tech might be about to get a lot more expensive, which will increase prices. And components might become more scarce. Plus, demand is growing from other places…

The Financial Times suggests that the transition to electric vehicles is approaching a tipping point in many parts of the world:

Electric vehicle ownership has reached a “tipping point” that signals an irreversible shift away from petrol cars, not only in China but parts of south-east Asia and Europe despite stalling in the US, expert research finds.
EVs accounted for a quarter of new car sales globally in 2025 and the pace of growth has continued into the first quarter of 2026.

And the Iran crisis seems to be accelerating that:

Sales of electric cars soared 51% in continental Europe last month, amid a rise in petrol and diesel costs driven by the Iran war.
Data shows that 224,000 new electric vehicles (EVs) were registered in March, and 500,000 across the first three months of the year – a 33.5% increase on a year earlier, according to analysis of national sales data in 15 countries by New AutoMotive and E-Mobility Europe, a trade body.

But the knock-on effect of that is likely to impact demand for the technology components and materials used…

Pure chaos theory

This is chaos in its most pure form. As a teenager in the 80s, I was fascinated by it both as a mathematical concept, and by the results that chaotic systems can generate. Some of you might remember the trend for fractal art back in the latter part of the 20th century. They are an expression of the tension between chaos and order in visual form. And the reason that they are so pleasing to use is that tension is expressed in the natural systems around us.

We are, as a species at least, used to living in chaotic systems. But we’ve eroded our familiarity with it as an idea over the last century.

It’s time to embrace the chaos again.

Wikipedia has a useful definition of chaos theory:

Chaos theory states that within the apparent randomness of chaotic complex systems, there are underlying patterns, interconnection, constant feedback loops, repetition, self-similarity, fractals and self-organization. The butterfly effect, an underlying principle of chaos, describes how a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state (meaning there is sensitive dependence on initial conditions).

We have, without realising it, created a perfect global system for chaotic effects. We’re not going to be able to unwind that any time soon, or without incalculable damage to our economies or our way of life. And so we have to learn to live within chaotic systems.

We need to learn resilience.

To survive chaos, focus on resilience, not control

The tech world already has a phrase for what all businesses need to be employing: chaos engineering. To quote Wikipedia again:

In software development, the ability of a given software to tolerate failures while still ensuring adequate quality of service—often termed resilience—is typically specified as a requirement. However, development teams may fail to meet this requirement due to factors such as short deadlines or lack of domain knowledge. Chaos engineering encompasses techniques aimed at meeting resilience requirements.

We could rewrite that as:

In 21st century business, the ability of a given system to tolerate failures while still ensuring adequate quality of service – often termed resilience – needs to be a core business planning requirement.

And so, we need chaos planning. We can’t just test our business systems against likely failures – but wild, unlikely ones, too. That’s the heart of the idea of chaos engineering. Bringing that to all businesses might involve us rethinking how we operate.

Chaos lies in chokepoints

For one thing, we are learning the danger of chokepoints. We have seen physical ones – like the Strait of Hormuz, or the Suez Canal – impact us. But we’ve also suffered from failures in structural chokepoints, too, like Germany’s reliance on natural gas, or the world’s reliance on Middle Eastern oil.

Hence, the reason we now have two compelling reasons behind the energy transition: the climate crisis and the permacrisis. The more we power our lives through electricity, and the less we power it, directly or indirectly, through fossil fuels, the more resilient we become.

As Apple’s Tim Cook announces his decision to step down, and be replaced by John Ternus, there has been plenty of evaluation of his time at the helm of the most valuable company in the world. What was often cited as one of his great achievements in his earlier days – the incredible China-based supply chain he built that allowed the iPhone to scale to global proportions – is now considered a problem of his legacy:

If President Xi Jinping’s imperialist instincts fade, Mr. Cook will be remembered for helping bring capitalism and liberalism to one of the most populous countries in the world. If the tensions between China and the United States continue to escalate, especially if Beijing makes good on its threats to attack the island of Taiwan — a democracy that happens to produce the vast majority of the world’s semiconductor chips — Mr. Cook will be remembered differently. He will be the man who not only squandered his company’s future (as it is still highly dependent on China), but also handed the West’s technological prowess to its biggest threat.

Taiwan: another chokepoint it bears watching, another potential trigger for a chaotic impact on the global economy.

Resilience is survival

The great challenge for the coming decades is twofold:

• How do we maintain the benefits of a globally connected economy?
• How do we mitigate against the worst chaotic effects that come with that?

There’s a proverb:

Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.

What happens when we hit “fool me thrice”? Because that’s where we are now. As global supply chains undergo another chaotic convulsion, those who learned the first time will be better placed to survive. Those who learned the second time, will be deeper into their planning, and better able to accelerate their adaptations. Those who are only just getting the message now that business as usual is long, long gone?

Well, I’d rather be competing against them than working for them.

The emergent lesson of the 2020s isn’t that we need to become better forecasters. It’s that we need to become more resilient. We can’t predict every crisis. We can build systems, organisations and societies that survive them, because chaos isn’t going away. Learning to live with it may be the defining skill of the century.