One of many problems with trying to use Unix as "modules" and "objects" is that they have things that aren't objects (like strings, etc) and this makes it difficult for arranging various scales and extensions of use.

It's not so much "scale-free" but this idea I mentioned elsewhere of "find the most difficult thing you have to do really nicely" and then see how it scales down (scaling up nicely rarely even barely possible). This was what worked with Smalltalk -- I came up with about 20 examples that had to be "nice", and some of them were "large" (for their day). We -- especially Dan Ingalls and Ted Kaehler -- were able to find ways to make the bigger more general things small and efficient enough to work uniformly over all the scales we had to deal with.

In other parts of this AMA I've mentioned some of the problems when extended to the whole world (but go for "galactic" to help thinking!)

Almost nothing in today's languages or OSs are in the current state of "biology".

However, several starts could be to relax from programming by message sending (a tough prospect in the large) to programming by message receiving, and in particular to program by intent/meaning negotiation.

And so forth.

Linda was a great idea of the 80s, what is the similar idea scaled for 40 years later? (It won't look like Linda, so don't start your thinking from there ...)

Etc.