Vendor Stack Fragility Doctrine

Vendor Stack Fragility Doctrine

Axiom

Every outsourced function carries hidden dependency risk.

Doctrine

This doctrine holds that vendor stacks introduce structural fragility by externalizing core system functions—identity, verification, compliance, data flow, security—into components the system does not fully control. Each added vendor contributes not only its own failure modes but also interaction effects with existing components, increasing coupling and reducing visibility.

As stacks deepen, accountability diffuses across organizational boundaries. Remediation pathways slow just as failure propagation accelerates. Small upstream disruptions cascade disproportionately because no single actor owns the seams where systems meet.

Vendor convenience accelerates adoption.
Vendor opacity accelerates fragility.

Within Convivial Systems Theory, Vendor-Stack Fragility Doctrine explains why modern systems fail noisily and recover slowly: capability migrates outward faster than governance capacity can follow.

Form

Dependency → Coupling → Opacity → Fragility

Neural Network Mapping

(Externalized modules and opaque failure modes)

In learning systems, vendor-stack fragility appears when critical functions are delegated to opaque modules, APIs, or pretrained components without end-to-end attribution. As external components accumulate, error provenance blurs and corrective action slows.

Failures no longer localize cleanly. Debugging becomes probabilistic. Responsibility diffuses across interfaces rather than residing within a coherent model boundary.

In ML terms:
externalized capability reduces traceability.
opacity compounds faster than performance.

Systems fail not because they are modular, but because their modules cannot be interrogated, owned, or repaired coherently.

Applied example (SIA)

Why LED Speed Signs Create New Hazards (Systems in Action)