Besides, software could absolutely be made much safer without destroying the economy. We all know that the systems that get hit are often a mess a twelve year old could "hack" by using specific search engines or kiddy scripts. Laws punishing those that run software with known vulnerabilities that end up causing society problems like these ransomware attacks do should have been made decades ago.
There is, again, no evidence that we know how to make commercially deployed software meaningfully safer at the scale we need to do it at to stop ransomware attacks from disrupting society.
I despise this sort of "technological nihilism." Just because something can be done with technology doesn't mean that it should be done. The fact that bitcoin exists does not mean we should revert back to the stone age. Anarchy is obviously a very bad idea, but I guess some people are determined to learn this lesson the hard way.
If the costs to mitigate the negative externalities of a certain product or service outweigh the net benefits of said product or service, the creation of that product or service is a net negative on society, and we should cease that activity.
It's like arguing that a coal-fired power plant isn't profitable if it has to pay for all the carbon that it's producing.
Coal power plants aren't profitable if they have to pay for their externalities, and should be shut down.
