WORK
The Next Catastrophe
Perrow's 2007 extension of normal accident theory to critical infrastructure and organizational concentration — arguing that structural approaches (modularity, decentralization) outperform procedural fixes in systems where catastrophe is architecturally inevitable.
The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters (Princeton, 2007) extended Perrow's framework beyond the reactor and the refinery to the electrical grid, the chemical plant network, the financial system, and the urban concentration that had made modern civilization exquisitely vulnerable to cascading failure. The book's central argument was structural: procedural safety interventions degrade under pressure and therefore cannot be the primary line of defense. What can defend a system is architecture — modularity that contains failures by design, decentralization that prevents single points of catastrophic dependency, and distribution that denies any individual failure the capacity to propagate system-wide.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The Next Catastrophe marked Perrow's sharpest turn toward prescriptive work. Normal Accidents had been diagnostic; The Next Catastrophe proposed remedies. The remedies were not procedural: not better training, not tighter regulations, not more sophisticated management. The remedies were architectural: make systems smaller, more modular, less concentrated, less dependent on a few