From Synners (1991) by Pat Cadigan:
Rosa laughed a little. ‘You’re approaching my threshold for that kinda talk. I’m a hacker, not a philosopher.’
Fez turned to look at her. ‘Good choice of word, threshold. The way we all kept adding to the nets did exactly that, passed a threshold. It got to the point where the net should have collapsed in chaos, but it didn’t. Or rather, it did, but the collapse was not a collapse in the conventional sense. Because the net kept accommodating the demands we put on it – that was its purpose, after all, to accommodate data. When it reached the point where it was burdened to the limit, it had two choices – crash, or accommodate. It did both.
‘Going over the brink of catastrophe was the first stage. The second was recovery – since it was programmed to accommodate, it did. But the only way it could accommodate was to exceed the limit. Institute a new limit, and when that was reached, go over the brink of catastrophe again, recover and institute a new limit beyond that. And so forth.’
‘Ad infinitum,’ Sam said, expressionlessly. ‘Like a fractal growing from the bottom up instead of the top down. Triggered by catastrophe.’
‘It didn’t get a break while all this was going on, of course,’ Fez continued. ‘The information never stopped coming in, which made for quite a lot of turbulence. But chaos is just another kind of order, and so we have another kind of net now than the one we started out with. We woke it up.’