Governance as Substrate.
Infrastructure where accountability is encoded before the first action occurs. Patterns tested across 3.8 billion years of biological regulation and 2,600 years of institutional governance.
Governance Primitives
Anchors
Non-negotiable invariants that survive changes of context.
Thin, enforceable, load-bearing. Civilization priors compiled into microsecond safety gates.
Rays
Legitimate interpretations that coexist within anchor bounds.
Disagreement is the healthy state. Target alignment is 0.83, not 1.00.
Absorbers
Mechanisms that convert dissonance into system learning without stalling.
Drift detection, validation gates, escalation ladders, inherited failure memory.
Abstraction Ladder
Biological regulation. Substrate shapes expression.
Formal mathematics. Anchors, rays, absorbers, cost.
Institutional design. 2,600 years of durable governance structures.
Signal manifold. Signals, warrants, tics, conformations.
Deployed code. 77 projects, 132,000 lines, measured behavior.
Research Corpus
313 synthesized papers · 12 clusters · 7 lanes · Feb 19–25, 2026