Good firmware tells no lies. But it doesn't have to be built with a specific OS in mind to be good - on the contrary, I believe that building firmware with specific OS in mind is what got us into this whole bad firmware mess.
And yet, holistic systems can lie. They can lie horribly about their state, and you'd be none the wiser. Being "holistic", created with the intention of the whole, does not mean that the system cannot lie. If the whole is created with the intention of lying to you, than it will.
We don't need holistic systems. We need good systems. A system doesn't need to be holistic to be good, and a system doesn't need to be good to be holistic.
So what would you want to have happening in the case Cantrill was talking about? The aim is to have good systems and there have been plenty of bad holistic systems in the history of computing. But by good, non-holistic systems, do you mean that we have a motherboard with well-documented firmware that the buyer of the hardware can't see into except according to the interfaces the vendor has provided? This seems to be potentially hiding the kind of information about a malfunctioning system that gets Cantrill so worked up about.
I do think that one of the prerequisites of (firm/soft)ware being good is being open source. For hardware to be good, I do believe it has to be well documented.
If we go by those two requirements, we can see how it works. We can fix things ourselves. And most importantly, anyone can create their own good firmware, without the need for the system to be designed in a holistic way.
And yet, holistic systems can lie. They can lie horribly about their state, and you'd be none the wiser. Being "holistic", created with the intention of the whole, does not mean that the system cannot lie. If the whole is created with the intention of lying to you, than it will.
We don't need holistic systems. We need good systems. A system doesn't need to be holistic to be good, and a system doesn't need to be good to be holistic.