“Everyone has observed the sonic phenomena of a political crowd of dozens or hundreds of thousands of people. The human river shouts a slogan in a uniform rhythm. Then another slogan springs from the head of the demonstration; it spreads towards the tail replacing the first. A wave of transition thus passes from the head to the tail. The clamour fills the city, and the inhibiting force of voice and rhythm reaches a climax. It is an event of great power and beauty in its ferocity. Then the impact between the demonstrators and the enemy occurs. The perfect rhythm of the last slogan breaks up in a huge cluster of chaotic shouts, which also spreads to the tail. Imagine, in addition the reports of dozens of machine guns and the whistle of bullets adding their punctuations to this total disorder. The crowd is then rapidly dispersed, and after sonic and visual hell follows a detonating calm, full of despair, dust and death. The statistical laws of these events, separated from their political or moral context… are the laws of the passage from complete order to total disorder in a continuous or explosive manner. They are stochastic laws.”
“We live in an era of great turbulence, with economic decline running in paradoxical tandem with technological advance. It is only to be expected that our antiquated institutions haven’t been able to keep up, and our nation states, political parties and supranational bodies are starting to unravel. Politicians now seem perennially in the business of chaos management, and the suspicion must be that this process has only just begun. The inevitable chorus of voices crying out for “a period of stability” sadly misses the point: we aren’t at that place in our history, and trying to impose inertia on those fluid times may only be inviting further discord.”
To put it simply, Chaos Engineering is one particular approach to “breaking things on purpose” that aims at teaching us something new about systems by performing experiments on them. Ultimately, our goal is to identify hidden problems that could arise in production. Only then will we be able to address systemic weaknesses and make our systems fault-tolerant. Chaos Engineering goes beyond traditional (failure) testing in that it’s not only about verifying assumptions. It also helps us explore the many unpredictable things that could happen and discover new properties of our inherently chaotic systems.
“our interpretations of the world are necessary tools for making sense of it, but fixing onto these beliefs as if they revealed the true nature of things can be dangerous. The world is always more chaotic than the order our closed systems of signs impose.”
All statements are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense.