Part II — The Argument
Chapter 4: The Graveyard
Autopsies conducted with a single question — not “was it expressive enough?” but “what happened when it went stale?”: expert systems, the Semantic Web’s missing consumers, canonical models that lived or died by whether they compiled into contracts. The control group: source code and database schemas, no more expressive than OWL, maintained faithfully across decades of total personnel turnover — because something visible breaks. The exceptions that prove the rule: schema.org rewarded by search traffic, digital twins instrumented by sensors — durability appearing precisely where conformance is observably rewarded.
Chapter 5: Load-Bearing
The differential decay thesis in full: decay rates set by enforcement, not expressiveness, formality, or tooling; the three phases of retained signal and their characteristic half-lives. Enforcement and discovery as one mechanism: divergence does not merely trigger repair, it locates the failing entry — the map of consequence is drawn by the live behavior of the system, never in advance. The uncomfortable corollary as design discipline: represent only what something will check — scoping by enforcement rather than coverage as the exact line separating infrastructure from expensive documentation.
Chapter 6: The Physics of Persistence
Deutsch’s knowledge as abstract constructor — information that, once instantiated, causes itself to remain so — and the Ship of Theseus as the original model-swap test. Deutsch and Marletto’s escape from the circularity at the foundation of information theory: information constituted by which copying and distinguishing tasks are possible — the load-bearing criterion arrived at independently, from physics, for independent reasons. The gap that makes this an engineering book rather than a physics book: nature’s self-correcting loops come free with the laws; organizational loops must be designed, funded, and defended. Same law, opposite side.