The Architecture of Dependence

Every large system embeds an architecture, and every architecture embeds a set of winners. Centralised infrastructure concentrates efficiency and fragility in the same place: it works beautifully until it does not, and when it fails, it fails for everyone at once.

This chapter compares the architecture of hyper-dependency against the architecture Solystopia proposes: not a rejection of scale, but a insistence that resilience live at the smallest scale that can hold it.