Infrastructural monoculture is how concentration can slip past the very pluralism meant to check it. A political system can be genuinely divided — many jurisdictions, competing institutions, adversarial courts and press — and still rest on a single technical substrate, if all of those plural actors depend on the same cloud, identity layer, model provider, chip architecture, or payment network. The surface looks contested; the foundation does not.
It matters because most of the safeguards a society trusts operate at the visible layer — elections, courts, competition, journalism — while the dependence that would actually constrain them sits below it, unexamined. A few providers failing, changing terms, or being captured could then impair many nominally independent institutions at once. It is the form ownership concentration takes where political power is distributed but infrastructure is not — which is why the regional studies look beneath the political map to the stack everyone quietly shares.