Definition
The condition in which reliance on a system has become invisible because it is ordinary: no one records it, no fallback is maintained, and withdrawal is no longer a question anyone asks. This is institutional dependence, meaning what the institution has come to rely on, and it should not be confused with the record-level dependence in STD-07 Article III, which governs what a given record rests on.
It matters because normalized dependence is what makes dependency state hard to measure and institutional capture hard to notice until a correction is needed and turns out to be unavailable. Its slow form is capacity depreciation: nothing is decided, and the fallback stops being real.
Tests that show it is in place
- Someone can state, without research, what happens to each dependent workflow if the system stops.
- Fallbacks named in the dependency record have been exercised within a stated interval.
- New dependents are recorded when they appear rather than discovered during an incident.
Evidence to keep
- Artifact: A dependency record listing every dependent workflow and its maintained fallback.
- Behavior: A new dependent workflow appearing in the record at onboarding, not at incident time.
- Metric: Share of dependent workflows with an exercised fallback.
References
- Dependence without standing · Theory