Digital Infrastructures at Scale Lead to Value, Power, and Risk (online book) (digitalinfrastructures.nl)

An online book titled "Digital Infrastructures at Scale Lead to Value, Power, and Risk" lays out a practical, theory-informed view of how large-scale digital systems create economic value, concentrate organizational and political power, and introduce systemic technical and governance risks. Drawing on promise theory, the author reframes contracts as complementary promises and shows how shared services, execution environments, and deployment diagrams interact to produce both capability and conflict. Key chapters — from "Things Break at Scale" to "Change and control" — stress predictable failure modes, the social-technical entanglements of shared infrastructure, and why architecture decisions matter beyond performance metrics. For the AI/ML community the book is particularly relevant: it defines "AI digital infrastructures," clarifies AI roles and responsibilities, and offers a unified framework for designing, operating, and governing models and pipelines at scale. Technical takeaways include using explicit contract semantics to manage dependencies, modeling execution environments and deployment artifacts to anticipate failure, and treating governance as part of design to mitigate power imbalances and systemic risk. Case studies and the book’s living-document approach make it a practical reference for engineers, architects, and policy-makers seeking resilient, accountable AI systems in production.