Vocabulary
Spandrel Souls. Conscious beings may be an architectural byproduct of the substrate once required for coordination. Civilization needed beings who could deliberate and got beings who could also feel. The feeling was real. It was never the requirement.
Trust Tax. The premium charged for occupying the only position from which verification can be performed, distinct from the real work of reconciling claims. It is rent collected inside a verification bottleneck.
Coherence Fee. The effort required to make claims from different contexts compose. The fee can fall, change form, or be disclosed more clearly, but cheaper verification does not make it vanish. The docket uses the same phrase for a narrower schema-level disclosure measure, and no result about that measure transfers to institutions without a separate argument.
Orphan Commitments. Obligations that persist after the process that made them has terminated. The commitment remains in the world after the computational actor has gone.
Kakudmī Problem. A mismatch between governing and human tempos in which an answer arrives after the world that made the question intelligible has passed. King Kakudmī waits through one performance at Brahmā's court and returns to a world twenty-seven ages older.
Process Theater. A formal route that imitates contestation without giving the affected person an answerable reviewer, a usable deadline, or the power to reverse the act. The form accepts text; the institution need not hear it.
Quiet Foreclosure. The elimination of practical alternatives through accumulated procedure, dependency, and switching cost rather than an overt command. Its force lies in making submission appear voluntary after every other route has become unusable.
Protocol Republic. A proposed order in which coordination infrastructure is governed by common rules, exercises of coercive authority leave contestable receipts, and no operator controls rulemaking, enforcement, adjudication, and custody at once.
Civic Asymmetry. The principle that legibility should increase with power. Institutions exercising coercive authority owe records to the people they govern; private persons retain opacity against systems that cannot answer for their use of personal information.
Fork Rights. The rights and practical means required to leave a coordination system with one's data, credentials, accumulated relationships, and a viable route to continued service under different stewardship. A nominal export that cannot support a real alternative is not credible exit.
Mercy Threshold. The point at which a true record must cease to determine a person's future automatically. It is implemented through designed forgetting and through judgment by an institution that can be named, challenged, and made to answer.
Surviving Principal. The persistent party that remains answerable for a delegation chain after transient agents and intermediate processes have ended. Registration, liability, bonding, insurance, and orphan-commitment rules make that answerability more than a name.
Local analytical terms include Proof Order, coordination without consensus, Kind Master Problem, membrane, Factor Prime, V/C ratio, Competence Trap, Specification Horizon, temporal sovereignty, Joule Standard, Homo Arbiter, epistemic foreclosure, necromantic consent, penumbra, Sea/Membrane/Apex, decision wake, participation horizon, grounding, and designed forgetting. Each is defined where it first performs work in the argument.