In 1984 Charles Perrow did huge spade work on analyzing the social side of technological risk
When a system is tightly coupled, there is little slack or buffer among its parts
The failure of one part can easily affect the others
Loose coupling means the opposite: there is a lot of slack among parts, so when one fails, the rest of the system can usually survive
He argued that the conventional engineering approach to ensuring safety by building in more warnings and safeguards--fails because system complexity makes failures inevitable
2018 book Meltdown contains many examples to support his visionary insights
