The standard reading treats Babel as a story about pride and punishment. The text itself says something stranger: the scattering was a coordination constraint, deliberately introduced by an architect who judged unbounded human cooperation dangerous. Read as system architecture, the story names a problem that has reappeared, in different vocabulary, at every subsequent moment when humanity has tried to recover a unified semantic substrate — and that has reappeared again, more literally than at any prior point, in the layer being built now.