Why would you assume that a catastrophic software collapse would only affect software, though? Picture ships unable to navigate at sea, goods, not being transported, power plants going offline, and the knock-on economic effects, which would be competing with the software problems as existential priorities. I suggest the system is a bit more fragile than you imagine, and that a couple of well-targeted mass panic events or attacks on critical infrastructure could be devastating.

Of course that's a Y2k-type disaster scenario, but it's a sad fact that that there are actors seeking the capability to militarize hacking on a grand scale, and others who seriously and desperately want to subvert the dominant paradigm and revert to older ones (Aleksandr Dugin in Russia being a good example, though fortunately not a very influential one). In a way, the US has yet to fully recover from 9-11, for example; the country has been in a defensive military posture ever since, suffered the economic equivalent of a heart attack ~7 years later, and has now undertaken a course of international isolationism and domestic policy that seems perverse by historical standards.

I don't disagree with you on the general resilience of software and networked information structures, indeed I'd say they're the best hope for our society and (contrary to the arguments of this writer) that maybe we should be hurrying to make our political and economic structures work more like the internet does, so that when they're damaged society can route around the damage rather than being paralyzed by it. What if, for example, we were able to do away with legislatures and the corruption they engender, and find a way to manage our legal codes like Wikipedia or Github projects at their best?

But while we grope towards more responsive political and social structures, we have to deal with the reality of high informational interconnectedness coupled with extremely rigid and asymmetry-maximizing power and control structures that are mostly hierarchical in nature. The vast majority of our organizations, government, institutional, and corporate, are hierarchical/pyramidal in nature with a very small number of executive actors exerting operational control which then propagates downward through the organization. Even if a firm relies on an internal culture or decision-model that's more cellular or distributed in nature, those legal structures of control still matter. It's an open question how well society can function if there's an attack on those critical structural elements.

With the advent of machine learning, is it so hard to conceive of a program that can seek out the critical actors within a corporation based not on things like their PII or job descriptions, but simply the volume, frequency, and centrality of their information traffic patterns? It might not go after the CEO or upper management at all; it might go after the paralegal of the smartest lawyer in the legal department, the person in the logistics department who hasn't called in sick in 10 years, and the manager of the company canteen, whose steadiness and reliability are critical to organizational health precisely because they've become taken for granted by everyone who interacts with them. Right now cyberattacks appear (to my uneducated eye) to be launched and evaluated in terms of scale and intensity, but it's only a matter of time before they evolve a preference for criticality and simultaneity.