---
type: "article"
title: "Signal ping: Coordination fails before systems do"
summary: "Scale without shared meaning is fragile by design."
newsletter: "Signals from Our Futures Past"
newsletter_handle: "mamund"
newsletter_url: "https://usecommune.com/n/mamund"
author: "Mike Amundsen (@mamund)"
published: "2026-01-28T13:30:38.000Z"
canonical_url: "https://usecommune.com/n/mamund/a/signal-ping-coordination-fails-before-systems-do"
markdown_url: "https://usecommune.com/n/mamund/a/signal-ping-coordination-fails-before-systems-do.md"
chat_url: "https://usecommune.com/n/mamund/a/signal-ping-coordination-fails-before-systems-do/chat"
source_url: "https://mamund.substack.com/p/signal-ping-coordination-fails-before"
body_source: "imported"
likes: 0
replies: 0
body_words: 71
---

# Signal ping: Coordination fails before systems do

[Jeremy Arendt](https://www.oreilly.com/people/jeremy-arendt/) identifies the semantic layer as the missing infrastructure we rarely budget for.

[![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Hfog!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F33e07c60-e55b-4115-85c0-fed61df6df1d_8192x4464.jpeg)](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Hfog!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F33e07c60-e55b-4115-85c0-fed61df6df1d_8192x4464.jpeg)

If we want to build systems that communicate, they must agree on what things mean. Without shared semantics, accountability fragments and costs spread quietly across organizations and time. History suggests that technical scale without semantic agreement always ends the same way.

Read the article here:
[https://www.oreilly.com/radar/the-trillion-dollar-problem/](https://www.oreilly.com/radar/the-trillion-dollar-problem/)

Takeaway : Scale without shared meaning is fragile by design.

***

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