Preface

Most software fails quietly.

Not with outages or breaches, but with erosion: trust thins, decisions become harder to defend, and migrations “work” while legitimacy decays.

This book starts from a simple observation:

Software does not fail first. Institutions do.

Most software writing assumes a hierarchy like:

Software → Data → Trust

This book argues the real hierarchy runs the other way:

Truth → Data → Trust → Software

Truth is the product.
Data is the enduring artefact.
Trust is the market.
Software is the temporary vessel.

Registries (land, companies, beneficial ownership) are the concrete exemplar because they operate where mistakes have legal consequence, data must outlive code, and legitimacy is non‑negotiable.

This book evolves institutional concepts in phases, following Gall’s Law: complex systems that work evolve from simpler systems that worked. Every abstraction is earned by failure.