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<strong style="color:#1e40af;">This paper reads best as a PDF</strong> —
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<a href="/whitepapers/distributive-equity.pdf" style="color:#1e40af;font-weight:600;text-decoration:underline;">Download PDF (39 pages)</a>
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<nav id="TOC">
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<ul>
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<li><a
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href="#distributive-equity-through-structure-a-community-scale-worked-example-of-values-stickiness"
|
||
id="toc-distributive-equity-through-structure-a-community-scale-worked-example-of-values-stickiness">Distributive
|
||
Equity Through Structure: A Community-Scale Worked Example of Values
|
||
Stickiness</a>
|
||
<ul>
|
||
<li><a href="#abstract" id="toc-abstract">Abstract</a></li>
|
||
<li><a href="#section-1-frame-and-scope"
|
||
id="toc-section-1-frame-and-scope">Section 1 — Frame and
|
||
scope</a></li>
|
||
<li><a
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||
href="#section-2-values-stickiness-the-argument-structure-is-answering"
|
||
id="toc-section-2-values-stickiness-the-argument-structure-is-answering">Section
|
||
2 — Values stickiness: the argument structure is answering</a></li>
|
||
<li><a href="#section-3-village-as-the-case"
|
||
id="toc-section-3-village-as-the-case">Section 3 — Village as the
|
||
case</a></li>
|
||
<li><a
|
||
href="#section-4-the-ai-substrate-village-ai-as-a-situated-language-layer"
|
||
id="toc-section-4-the-ai-substrate-village-ai-as-a-situated-language-layer">Section
|
||
4 — The AI substrate: Village AI as a Situated Language
|
||
Layer</a></li>
|
||
<li><a
|
||
href="#section-5-māori-grounded-principles-inside-the-tractatus-pluralism-layer"
|
||
id="toc-section-5-māori-grounded-principles-inside-the-tractatus-pluralism-layer">Section
|
||
5 — Māori-grounded principles inside the Tractatus pluralism
|
||
layer</a></li>
|
||
<li><a
|
||
href="#section-6-the-three-function-model-as-three-places-drift-happens"
|
||
id="toc-section-6-the-three-function-model-as-three-places-drift-happens">Section
|
||
6 — The three-function model as three places drift happens</a></li>
|
||
<li><a
|
||
href="#section-7-distributive-equity-as-a-consequence-of-values-stickiness"
|
||
id="toc-section-7-distributive-equity-as-a-consequence-of-values-stickiness">Section
|
||
7 — Distributive equity as a consequence of values
|
||
stickiness</a></li>
|
||
<li><a href="#section-8-structural-audit-criteria"
|
||
id="toc-section-8-structural-audit-criteria">Section 8 — Structural
|
||
audit criteria</a></li>
|
||
<li><a href="#section-9-gaps" id="toc-section-9-gaps">Section 9 —
|
||
Gaps</a></li>
|
||
<li><a href="#section-10-open-research-questions"
|
||
id="toc-section-10-open-research-questions">Section 10 — Open
|
||
research questions</a></li>
|
||
<li><a href="#section-11-methodology-scope-and-self-reporting"
|
||
id="toc-section-11-methodology-scope-and-self-reporting">Section 11
|
||
— Methodology, scope, and self-reporting</a></li>
|
||
<li><a href="#references" id="toc-references">References</a></li>
|
||
<li><a href="#copyright-and-licence"
|
||
id="toc-copyright-and-licence">Copyright and Licence</a></li>
|
||
</ul></li>
|
||
</ul>
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||
</nav>
|
||
|
||
<h1
|
||
id="distributive-equity-through-structure-a-community-scale-worked-example-of-values-stickiness">Distributive
|
||
Equity Through Structure: A Community-Scale Worked Example of Values
|
||
Stickiness</h1>
|
||
<p><em>Structural Distributive Equity: How a Community-Scale
|
||
Platform Implements Values Stickiness Through a Constitutional
|
||
Architecture at Sub-Big-Tech Scale.</em></p>
|
||
<p><strong>Author</strong> — John Stroh, Director, My Digital
|
||
Sovereignty Limited, Aotearoa New Zealand <strong>ORCID</strong> —
|
||
<a
|
||
href="https://orcid.org/0009-0005-2933-7170">0009-0005-2933-7170</a>
|
||
<strong>DOI</strong> — <a
|
||
href="https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19600614">10.5281/zenodo.19600614</a>
|
||
<strong>Version</strong> — 1.0 (first reviewed edition) <strong>Date
|
||
of first publication</strong> — 2026-04-16 <strong>Licence</strong>
|
||
— Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (<a
|
||
href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY 4.0</a>)
|
||
<strong>Suggested citation</strong> — Stroh, J. (2026).
|
||
<em>Distributive Equity Through Structure: A Community-Scale Worked
|
||
Example of Values Stickiness</em>. Version 1.0. My Digital
|
||
Sovereignty Limited, Aotearoa New Zealand. DOI: <a
|
||
href="https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19600614"
|
||
class="uri">https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19600614</a>. Published
|
||
at <a
|
||
href="https://agenticgovernance.digital/whitepapers/distributive-equity.html"
|
||
class="uri">https://agenticgovernance.digital/whitepapers/distributive-equity.html</a>.
|
||
ORCID: <a href="https://orcid.org/0009-0005-2933-7170"
|
||
class="uri">https://orcid.org/0009-0005-2933-7170</a>. Licensed
|
||
under CC BY 4.0. <strong>Corresponding author</strong> — <a
|
||
href="mailto:john.stroh@mysovereignty.digital"
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class="email">john.stroh@mysovereignty.digital</a></p>
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||
<a href="/whitepapers/distributive-equity-fr.pdf">FR</a> ·
|
||
<a href="/whitepapers/distributive-equity-nl.pdf">NL</a> ·
|
||
<a href="/whitepapers/distributive-equity-mi.pdf">MI</a><br>
|
||
<strong>DOI:</strong>
|
||
<a href="https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19600614">10.5281/zenodo.19600614</a>
|
||
· <strong>ORCID:</strong>
|
||
<a href="https://orcid.org/0009-0005-2933-7170">0009-0005-2933-7170</a></p>
|
||
</div>
|
||
<hr />
|
||
<p><strong>Status.</strong> This paper is not peer-reviewed. The
|
||
author is not a legal scholar. It is a documentary case study
|
||
produced by the operator of the platform it describes, written to
|
||
make the platform’s structural and constitutional commitments
|
||
legible to a research programme that has been developing analytical
|
||
tools for the welfare concerns those commitments address.</p>
|
||
<hr />
|
||
<h2 id="abstract">Abstract</h2>
|
||
<p>A body of recent legal scholarship argues that digital platforms
|
||
exercise a distinct form of power — <em>ecosystem power</em> —
|
||
operating simultaneously through three roles: as gatekeepers to the
|
||
platform, as legislators of the relationships within their
|
||
ecosystems, and as contractual actors participating in the
|
||
transactions they rule on.<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref"
|
||
id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> Adjacent work
|
||
proposes <em>distributive equity</em>, the fair allocation of
|
||
welfare across all ecosystem participants, as a candidate additional
|
||
consideration for antitrust enforcement where those participants are
|
||
not equally served by traditional competition-law analysis.<a
|
||
href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a></p>
|
||
<p>This paper documents a single worked example: a community-scale
|
||
platform (<em>Village</em>, operated by My Digital Sovereignty Ltd,
|
||
Aotearoa New Zealand) whose structural commitments are the enactment
|
||
of a prior theoretical commitment — that the welfare pathology
|
||
identified in the research programme is best understood as a
|
||
<em>values drift</em> pathology, and that structural architecture is
|
||
the mechanism by which a platform’s declared values can be made
|
||
sticky enough to resist that drift.</p>
|
||
<p>The paper situates Village’s structural commitments inside the
|
||
<em>Tractatus framework</em> that generated them — a constitutional
|
||
architecture grounded in Wittgenstein’s sayable / unsayable
|
||
distinction, Berlin’s value pluralism, Ostrom’s polycentric
|
||
governance, Alexander’s living-systems principles, and Te Ao Māori
|
||
frameworks of indigenous data sovereignty — and argues that the
|
||
overlap between Village’s work and the legal-academic research
|
||
programme is at the values layer, not only at the structural layer.
|
||
Both are responses to the same concern: that platform power, left to
|
||
drift, will be exercised against the welfare of ecosystem
|
||
participants whose welfare the market does not defend. Village’s
|
||
answer is an architecture in which values are enforced by the
|
||
platform’s code rather than asserted in the platform’s
|
||
marketing.</p>
|
||
<p>The author is a single-founder company director, not a legal
|
||
scholar. The paper’s contribution is documentary rather than
|
||
theoretical: it offers the research programme one
|
||
primary-source-rich case to assess, critique, extend, or reject.</p>
|
||
<hr />
|
||
<h2 id="section-1-frame-and-scope">Section 1 — Frame and scope</h2>
|
||
<p>The <em>Taming Ecosystem Power of Platforms through Contract and
|
||
Competition Law</em> research project at the University of Antwerp
|
||
Faculty of Law, conducted under principal investigator Jan Blockx
|
||
and funded by the Research Foundation – Flanders, has proposed and
|
||
developed an ecosystem-based legal model for the distinctive forms
|
||
of power platforms exercise inside the ecosystems they host.<a
|
||
href="#fn3" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref3"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>3</sup></a> The project’s central analytical
|
||
move is to treat the platform not as a single actor with market
|
||
power but as an actor discharging three simultaneous and sometimes
|
||
conflicting functions: as gatekeeper determining access to the
|
||
ecosystem; as legislator writing the rules that govern participants
|
||
within the ecosystem; and as a contractual actor party to the
|
||
transactions those rules govern. The author of this paper
|
||
understands the three-function model as the paper’s primary
|
||
analytical lens and acknowledges the Blockx project as the framing
|
||
scholarship.</p>
|
||
<p>A separate but related contribution proposes <em>distributive
|
||
equity</em> as an analytical extension: the welfare generated by an
|
||
ecosystem should be evaluated not only for total magnitude but for
|
||
how it is distributed among the stakeholder groups the ecosystem
|
||
comprises, with particular attention to groups whose position in the
|
||
ecosystem is asymmetric and whose welfare is most vulnerable to the
|
||
platform’s internal pricing and contractual leverages.<a href="#fn4"
|
||
class="footnote-ref" id="fnref4" role="doc-noteref"><sup>4</sup></a>
|
||
That proposal does not prescribe a specific remedy; it identifies a
|
||
gap in existing competition, contract, and consumer law where
|
||
internal welfare distribution is not adequately addressed and
|
||
proposes distributive equity as one candidate consideration for
|
||
closing it.</p>
|
||
<p>This paper’s author is a single-founder company director who has
|
||
spent the past two years building the platform described in Section
|
||
3 and the theoretical framework described in Section 2. The author
|
||
is not trained in EU competition law and makes no claim to peer
|
||
standing with the research programme cited above. The paper is a
|
||
documentary submission: one worked example, written up by the
|
||
operator of the platform it documents, offered to the legal-academic
|
||
community on the footing that the community will exercise its own
|
||
authority in assessing it.</p>
|
||
<p><strong>What the paper is.</strong> A documentation of one
|
||
platform’s public structural and constitutional commitments; an
|
||
argument that those commitments are the enactment of a prior
|
||
theoretical position about values stickiness in organisational form;
|
||
a mapping of that position onto the three-function model and the
|
||
distributive-equity framing; a disclosure of what is not yet
|
||
enforced and what depends on founder good-faith; an invitation to
|
||
the legal-academic community to assess whether the documentary
|
||
approach offers anything useful to the research programme, and if
|
||
so, what.</p>
|
||
<p><strong>What the paper is not.</strong> A general theory of
|
||
platform constraint; a claim that the platform has “solved”
|
||
distributive equity; a counter-thesis to existing legal scholarship;
|
||
a marketing piece for the platform, its operator, or any associated
|
||
commercial interest; a proposal for regulatory enforcement or
|
||
legislative change; a peer contribution to the research programme it
|
||
cites.</p>
|
||
<p><strong>Method.</strong> The paper’s factual claims about the
|
||
platform are verifiable from the public artifacts cited in Section
|
||
8. Its theoretical claims are grounded in the published
|
||
philosophical foundations of the Tractatus framework<a href="#fn5"
|
||
class="footnote-ref" id="fnref5"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>5</sup></a><a href="#fn6"
|
||
class="footnote-ref" id="fnref6" role="doc-noteref"><sup>6</sup></a>
|
||
and in the value-drift and mission-drift analyses the operator has
|
||
published in the AI Governance for Communities article series.<a
|
||
href="#fn7" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref7"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>7</sup></a><a href="#fn8"
|
||
class="footnote-ref" id="fnref8" role="doc-noteref"><sup>8</sup></a>
|
||
Where the author has relied on AI-assisted drafting, that assistance
|
||
is disclosed; the author takes full responsibility for every claim
|
||
and welcomes correction.</p>
|
||
<hr />
|
||
<h2
|
||
id="section-2-values-stickiness-the-argument-structure-is-answering">Section
|
||
2 — Values stickiness: the argument structure is answering</h2>
|
||
<h3 id="the-seed-insight-and-its-intellectual-origin">2.1 The seed
|
||
insight and its intellectual origin</h3>
|
||
<p>The theoretical position this paper documents did not arise from
|
||
a single reflection. It emerged over approximately two years of the
|
||
author’s pre-Village work on organisational form and digital
|
||
sovereignty, under the working name <em>Sy.Digital</em>, before the
|
||
Village platform itself existed. Two documents in that corpus anchor
|
||
the position in dated form. The first, <em>Sy.Digital Core Values
|
||
and Principles</em> (STR-VAL-0001, 29 March 2025), articulated a
|
||
single coherent set of organisational values — sovereignty,
|
||
transparency, community, and progressive implementation among them —
|
||
along with a governance framework (STR-GOV-0002, 31 March 2025) that
|
||
attempted to align all organisational activity to that single set.
|
||
The second, <em>Agentic Organizational Structure: A New Paradigm for
|
||
Digital Sovereignty</em> (STO-INN-0002, 22 April 2025), took the
|
||
next step. It argued that <em>“traditional organizational
|
||
hierarchies were designed around knowledge control as a primary
|
||
organizing principle”</em>, that <em>“when knowledge is no longer
|
||
scarce but universally accessible through AI assistance, the
|
||
fundamental premise of hierarchical organization breaks down”</em>,
|
||
and proposed a four-quadrant structure organised around time
|
||
horizons and information persistence rather than knowledge control.
|
||
Its tenth section was entitled <em>Beyond Bureaucracy</em>.<a
|
||
href="#fn9" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref9"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>9</sup></a></p>
|
||
<p>The author’s summary of the underlying realisation, recorded a
|
||
year later in an unsent grant application draft in March 2026, reads
|
||
in full: <em>“The project was inspired by the realisation that AI’s
|
||
most significant impact on organisations in the short term would
|
||
mean that Max Weber was no longer relevant. The value of an
|
||
organisation could no longer rely on hierarchies of knowledge and
|
||
skill.”</em><a href="#fn10" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref10"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>10</sup></a> The insight was the same
|
||
insight that STO-INN-0002 had developed a year earlier without
|
||
naming Weber directly. This paper is the first to make the argument
|
||
in Weber’s own terms and to place it in a legal-academic frame.</p>
|
||
<p>Max Weber’s theory of organisation, most completely articulated
|
||
in the posthumously published <em>Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft</em>
|
||
(1922), located organisational legitimacy in the rational-legal
|
||
division of expertise: the bureaucratic form organises specialised
|
||
knowledge into hierarchies of authority whose decisions are
|
||
legitimated by the expertise the hierarchy embodies. Bureaucracy is
|
||
efficient because the apex sets direction, the middle layers
|
||
translate direction into procedure, and the operatives execute
|
||
procedure under supervision. Each level adds value because each
|
||
level holds knowledge the level below does not. Knowledge asymmetry
|
||
supplies the coordination that makes hierarchical authority
|
||
functional. For a century, the Weberian form has been the dominant
|
||
model of large organisational activity across government, industry,
|
||
education, and the platform-age corporate structure alike.</p>
|
||
<p>Large language models trained on internet-scale text have, in
|
||
practical effect, substantially collapsed the knowledge asymmetry on
|
||
which the Weberian form depends. An operative at the base of a
|
||
hierarchy can now reach, on demand, expert-level content on any
|
||
domain the hierarchy once organised around. The apex can draft
|
||
strategy at the speed of a senior operative. The middle layers whose
|
||
function was to translate direction into procedure are rapidly
|
||
discovering that much of the translation task is now automatable.
|
||
The hierarchical ordering of knowledge and skill that Weber
|
||
identified as the source of bureaucratic legitimacy is no longer
|
||
doing the coordination work it once did.</p>
|
||
<p>Some substitute mechanism must take its place. What traditional
|
||
organisations have long claimed would take its place — values,
|
||
mission, purpose, culture — has historically failed to. Declared
|
||
values drift under personnel changes, market pressure, competitive
|
||
imitation, and the gradual erosion that occurs when nobody monitors
|
||
the distance between what the organisation says it is for and what
|
||
it does. The failure mode is familiar enough in organisational
|
||
practice to have become proverbial: <em>“in the end they became what
|
||
they set out to replace.”</em> Village’s own published analyses
|
||
document this failure mode under the headings <em>Mission Drift
|
||
Through Technology Adoption</em><a href="#fn11" class="footnote-ref"
|
||
id="fnref11" role="doc-noteref"><sup>11</sup></a> and <em>Resisting
|
||
Drift Toward Global-Internet Norms</em>,<a href="#fn12"
|
||
class="footnote-ref" id="fnref12"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>12</sup></a> and locate the same observation
|
||
in each case: declared values erode under technological and market
|
||
pressures unless given a mechanism by which they can persist.
|
||
Weber’s theory does not supply that mechanism; it did not need to,
|
||
because the knowledge hierarchy supplied it. In the
|
||
post-knowledge-hierarchy condition, some substitute is required.</p>
|
||
<h3
|
||
id="what-values-stickiness-means-and-the-pivot-from-monolithic-to-plural-values">2.2
|
||
What “values stickiness” means, and the pivot from monolithic to
|
||
plural values</h3>
|
||
<p>This paper uses <em>values stickiness</em> to name the property
|
||
an organisation has when its declared values are architecturally
|
||
resistant to drift. An organisation has values stickiness if the
|
||
mechanisms by which it coordinates action, resolves conflict, and
|
||
holds participants accountable are themselves structurally bound to
|
||
its declared values, such that drifting away from the declared
|
||
values would require breaking the structure rather than
|
||
reinterpreting a policy document. The claim is not cultural — it is
|
||
not about what the organisation’s members believe — but structural:
|
||
about what the organisation’s architecture makes easy, hard, and
|
||
impossible.</p>
|
||
<p>The concept is uncontroversial once stated, and its force derives
|
||
from the observation that most contemporary platforms do not possess
|
||
it. A platform whose values exist in a marketing document, a code of
|
||
conduct, or a published mission statement — while its code enforces
|
||
whatever is optimal for engagement, revenue, or growth — has no
|
||
values stickiness. The declared values can drift whenever they
|
||
become commercially inconvenient, and the drift will not be visible
|
||
to participants until the pathology the research programme diagnoses
|
||
is already under way.</p>
|
||
<p><strong>The pivot from monolithic to plural values.</strong> The
|
||
author’s own earlier work aimed at values stickiness within a
|
||
different conceptual frame. The March-April 2025 Sy.Digital
|
||
governance documents cited above sought to secure a single coherent
|
||
set of organisational values against drift through the mechanism of
|
||
a <em>values alignment framework</em> — essentially, a rubric that
|
||
mapped a unitary value-set to observable indicators across
|
||
organisational activity, so that a single value-framework could be
|
||
held stable over time. The intuition behind that framework is
|
||
familiar in late-modern organisational practice, and it draws on a
|
||
diagnosis that has been developed across a substantial body of
|
||
scholarship: that the cultural and institutional drift from communal
|
||
to individualist value frameworks over the past two centuries — what
|
||
Alasdair MacIntyre describes as the fragmentation of moral discourse
|
||
under conditions of late modernity,<a href="#fn13"
|
||
class="footnote-ref" id="fnref13"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>13</sup></a> what Charles Taylor identifies
|
||
as atomism as a cultural condition rather than a natural one,<a
|
||
href="#fn14" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref14"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>14</sup></a> what Robert Bellah and
|
||
colleagues document as the tension between individualism and
|
||
community in late-modern societies,<a href="#fn15"
|
||
class="footnote-ref" id="fnref15"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>15</sup></a> what Robert Putnam demonstrates
|
||
empirically as the decline of social capital,<a href="#fn16"
|
||
class="footnote-ref" id="fnref16"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>16</sup></a> what Michael Sandel describes
|
||
as the procedural republic crowding out substantive community
|
||
goods,<a href="#fn17" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref17"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>17</sup></a> and what Thomas Piketty’s work
|
||
on long-run capital concentration suggests has attendant economic
|
||
effects<a href="#fn18" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref18"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>18</sup></a> — has produced a condition in
|
||
which the rights and interests of communities, as distinct from the
|
||
rights and interests of the wealthiest individual participants, have
|
||
become progressively harder to defend through market or contract
|
||
mechanisms alone. The author makes no attempt to adjudicate that
|
||
substantial scholarly debate. This paper treats it as background
|
||
context to a narrower observation: the early Sy.Digital work
|
||
attempted to respond to this condition by holding a <em>single</em>
|
||
organisational value-set stable against drift, as if the correct
|
||
answer to values erosion were better alignment to a unitary
|
||
framework.</p>
|
||
<p><strong>The middle-of-evolution realisation.</strong> The pivotal
|
||
realisation that eventually reshaped the Tractatus framework was
|
||
that the single-framework response was itself misconceived. The
|
||
deeper claim — drawn from Isaiah Berlin’s mature statement of value
|
||
pluralism, most explicitly in his 1988 lecture <em>The Pursuit of
|
||
the Ideal</em><a href="#fn19" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref19"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>19</sup></a> — is that the plurality of
|
||
genuine human values is not an obstacle to a coherent value system
|
||
but a condition of human life as such. Berlin’s view, developed
|
||
across <em>Four Essays on Liberty</em><a href="#fn20"
|
||
class="footnote-ref" id="fnref20"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>20</sup></a> and reaffirmed in the late
|
||
essay, is that the search for a single harmonious value system is
|
||
both a philosophical error (because genuine goods are sometimes
|
||
incommensurable) and a historical danger (because monolithic value
|
||
systems tend, under pressure, toward coercion). John Gray’s
|
||
interpretive study of Berlin develops this reading: that pluralism
|
||
for Berlin is not relativism, nor a second-best alternative to the
|
||
search for a unified moral framework, but the condition under which
|
||
genuinely human life is possible.<a href="#fn21"
|
||
class="footnote-ref" id="fnref21"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>21</sup></a> On this view, plural values are
|
||
not a feature to be accommodated in an organisation designed for
|
||
something else. They are the substrate of the organisation’s
|
||
possibility.</p>
|
||
<p>The practical consequence for the Tractatus framework was that
|
||
values stickiness could not be achieved by holding a single
|
||
value-set stable. It had to be achieved by holding plural values
|
||
open — by structurally preventing the platform from collapsing the
|
||
plurality into a single hierarchy, whether through engagement
|
||
optimisation, procedural homogenisation, or the accumulated pressure
|
||
of competitive imitation. The architectural task shifted from
|
||
<em>“how do we stabilise our values?”</em> to <em>“how do we keep
|
||
plural values genuinely plural over time?”</em> Section 2.3
|
||
describes the Tractatus framework’s response to the reformulated
|
||
problem, and Section 2.4 describes the three-layer constitutional
|
||
architecture in which the response is implemented.</p>
|
||
<h3 id="the-tractatus-framework-as-values-stickiness-engineered">2.3
|
||
The Tractatus framework as values stickiness engineered</h3>
|
||
<p>Village’s values stickiness is implemented by a constitutional
|
||
architecture called the <em>Tractatus framework</em>. The name
|
||
deliberately invokes Wittgenstein’s <em>Tractatus
|
||
Logico-Philosophicus</em> (1921). The framework has been documented
|
||
in the operator’s published philosophical materials,<a href="#fn22"
|
||
class="footnote-ref" id="fnref22"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>22</sup></a><a href="#fn23"
|
||
class="footnote-ref" id="fnref23"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>23</sup></a> and its philosophical
|
||
foundations are drawn from five traditions separated by a century
|
||
and a hemisphere: the sayable / unsayable distinction from
|
||
Wittgenstein, the value pluralism of Isaiah Berlin, the
|
||
polycentric-governance and commons research of Elinor Ostrom, the
|
||
living-systems pattern-language work of Christopher Alexander, and
|
||
the Māori data sovereignty frameworks articulated by Te Mana
|
||
Raraunga and the Global Indigenous Data Alliance.</p>
|
||
<p><strong>From Wittgenstein: the epistemic boundary.</strong>
|
||
Proposition 7 of the <em>Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus</em> —
|
||
<em>“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”</em> — is
|
||
not a counsel of defeat. It is an epistemic commitment: some things
|
||
can be systematised and some cannot, and confusing the two produces
|
||
nonsense. The Tractatus framework inherits this commitment
|
||
architecturally. Technical optimisations, pattern matching,
|
||
information retrieval, measurement — these belong to the domain of
|
||
the sayable, and the platform’s AI systems are permitted to act
|
||
autonomously within that domain. Value hierarchies, cultural
|
||
protocols, grief processing, strategic direction, the resolution of
|
||
incommensurable goods — these belong to the unsayable, and the
|
||
platform’s AI systems are not permitted to act autonomously on them.
|
||
The boundary is enforced not by policy documents but by code: a
|
||
BoundaryEnforcer service classifies every decision type and blocks
|
||
AI from acting autonomously on anything outside the technical
|
||
domain.<a href="#fn24" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref24"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>24</sup></a></p>
|
||
<p><strong>From Berlin: value pluralism as the condition of human
|
||
life.</strong> Isaiah Berlin’s central claim, developed across
|
||
<em>Two Concepts of Liberty</em> (1958), <em>Four Essays on
|
||
Liberty</em> (1969), and restated most explicitly in <em>The Pursuit
|
||
of the Ideal</em> (1988), is that genuine human values are plural,
|
||
sometimes incommensurable, and frequently in conflict, and that the
|
||
attempt to reduce them to a single harmonious system is both
|
||
philosophically mistaken and historically dangerous.<a href="#fn25"
|
||
class="footnote-ref" id="fnref25"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>25</sup></a><a href="#fn26"
|
||
class="footnote-ref" id="fnref26"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>26</sup></a> As the author understands
|
||
Berlin, and as John Gray’s interpretive study develops the
|
||
reading,<a href="#fn27" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref27"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>27</sup></a> value pluralism is not
|
||
relativism. It is not a second-best compromise reached when a
|
||
unifying framework proves elusive. It is the anthropological
|
||
condition under which the choices that make human life recognisably
|
||
human become intelligible in the first place. A creature for which
|
||
every value could be weighed against every other on a single scale
|
||
would not make choices in the sense that humans make them; a life in
|
||
which no genuine trade-off between goods ever presented itself would
|
||
not be recognisably a human life. Plural values, on this reading,
|
||
are what keeps humans being human.</p>
|
||
<p>The implication for AI governance is immediate. <em>No objective
|
||
function resolves conflicts between incommensurable values.</em> Any
|
||
system that claims to “optimise” across such values is not neutral —
|
||
it is imposing a hidden hierarchy, and the hidden hierarchy will
|
||
drift in the direction of whatever is easiest to measure. The
|
||
Tractatus framework inherits Berlin’s commitment in three specific
|
||
architectural forms. First, it recognises six irreducibly different
|
||
moral frameworks — deontological, consequentialist, virtue, care,
|
||
communitarian, and indigenous relational — and refuses to resolve
|
||
conflicts between them algorithmically, instead surfacing each
|
||
conflict to a human decision-maker together with a transparent
|
||
account of what each framework would recommend and what each choice
|
||
would sacrifice.<a href="#fn28" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref28"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>28</sup></a> Second, it applies asymmetric
|
||
evidence burdens to value-loaded changes: a change that tightens a
|
||
safety threshold requires only 60% confidence, while a change that
|
||
loosens one requires 85% confidence, on the ground that the
|
||
consequences of error are not symmetric across value dimensions and
|
||
the costs of false negatives exceed the costs of false positives
|
||
where values are at stake.<a href="#fn29" class="footnote-ref"
|
||
id="fnref29" role="doc-noteref"><sup>29</sup></a> Third, and most
|
||
importantly for the post-pivot reading sketched in Section 2.2, it
|
||
treats the preservation of value plurality as itself a Layer 1
|
||
invariant — the platform is not permitted to collapse the plurality
|
||
into a single hierarchy through any means, including the indirect
|
||
means of optimisation toward engagement, revenue, or growth metrics
|
||
that would, over time, do the collapsing silently.</p>
|
||
<p><strong>From Ostrom: polycentric governance and nested
|
||
enterprises.</strong> Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel-prize-winning research
|
||
in <em>Governing the Commons</em> (1990) demonstrated that
|
||
communities govern shared resources effectively through polycentric
|
||
governance — multiple independent centres of authority operating
|
||
without hierarchical subordination, with clear boundaries,
|
||
collective-choice arrangements, monitoring, graduated sanctions,
|
||
conflict resolution, and nested enterprises.<a href="#fn30"
|
||
class="footnote-ref" id="fnref30"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>30</sup></a> The Tractatus framework
|
||
inherits this commitment by structuring Village’s governance as a
|
||
<em>three-layer constitutional architecture</em> in which
|
||
platform-level universal principles, tenant-level community
|
||
constitutions, and member-level personal preferences each operate
|
||
under clearly defined authority and nest into each other without
|
||
either subordinating or erasing the lower layers. Section 2.4
|
||
documents the architecture in detail.</p>
|
||
<p><strong>From Alexander: structural integrity as values
|
||
integrity.</strong> Christopher Alexander’s work on pattern
|
||
languages and architectural theory (<em>A Pattern Language</em>,
|
||
1977; <em>The Nature of Order</em>, 2002–2004) argues that living
|
||
systems exhibit structural properties that emerge from attention to
|
||
how parts relate to wholes, and that these properties cannot be
|
||
achieved through top-down planning.<a href="#fn31"
|
||
class="footnote-ref" id="fnref31"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>31</sup></a> Five of Alexander’s principles
|
||
are codified into the Tractatus framework as named rules: <em>Deep
|
||
Interlock</em> (components coordinate through mutual validation
|
||
rather than isolated approval), <em>Structure-Preserving
|
||
Transformation</em> (changes preserve essential structure),
|
||
<em>Gradients Rather Than Boundaries</em> (living systems operate on
|
||
intensity gradients rather than binary switches), <em>Living
|
||
Process</em> (the framework evolves from operational experience
|
||
rather than predetermined specification), and
|
||
<em>Not-Separateness</em> (governance is embedded in architecture,
|
||
not bolted on as an afterthought).<a href="#fn32"
|
||
class="footnote-ref" id="fnref32"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>32</sup></a> The last of these is
|
||
load-bearing for the values-stickiness argument. Bolted-on
|
||
governance can be bypassed under pressure; embedded governance
|
||
cannot, because the structure within which the platform operates is
|
||
itself the governance. This is values stickiness stated as an
|
||
architectural principle.</p>
|
||
<p><strong>From Te Ao Māori: kaitiakitanga and
|
||
rangatiratanga.</strong> Indigenous data sovereignty frameworks,
|
||
particularly Te Mana Raraunga’s principles and the CARE Principles
|
||
for Indigenous Data Governance,<a href="#fn33" class="footnote-ref"
|
||
id="fnref33" role="doc-noteref"><sup>33</sup></a><a href="#fn34"
|
||
class="footnote-ref" id="fnref34"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>34</sup></a> provide a complete account of
|
||
the relationship between data, community, and authority that the
|
||
other four traditions do not supply on their own. Data about a
|
||
community belongs to that community — not to a platform, not to a
|
||
researcher, not to a government. The community exercises
|
||
rangatiratanga (self-determination) over its own data; the platform
|
||
exercises kaitiakitanga (guardianship) — a fiduciary obligation to
|
||
protect, not to own.<a href="#fn35" class="footnote-ref"
|
||
id="fnref35" role="doc-noteref"><sup>35</sup></a> The Tractatus
|
||
framework inherits this commitment architecturally: tenant
|
||
isolation, community-controlled governance, and sovereign hosting on
|
||
infrastructure outside US-jurisdiction are not engineering choices
|
||
that happen to align with indigenous data sovereignty. They are
|
||
implementations of rangatiratanga as a design invariant.</p>
|
||
<h3 id="the-three-layer-constitutional-architecture">2.4 The
|
||
three-layer constitutional architecture</h3>
|
||
<p>The Tractatus framework is implemented at Village through a
|
||
three-layer constitutional architecture in which each layer is bound
|
||
to the layer above it and constrains the layer below.<a href="#fn36"
|
||
class="footnote-ref" id="fnref36"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>36</sup></a></p>
|
||
<p><strong>Layer 1 — Universal platform principles
|
||
(immutable).</strong> Certain commitments are hardcoded and cannot
|
||
be overridden by any tenant, administrator, or user. They include
|
||
tenant data isolation enforced at the data-access layer; the right
|
||
of any member to leave with their data at any time; consent
|
||
requirements for data use; no imposed value hierarchy across
|
||
communities; and the Not-Separateness principle itself — governance
|
||
is embedded in architecture, not applied as a filter. These are not
|
||
policies that could be changed through a governance process. They
|
||
are structural constraints that make certain categories of violation
|
||
architecturally impossible.</p>
|
||
<p><strong>Layer 2 — Tenant constitutional principles (customisable
|
||
within Layer 1).</strong> Each Village defines its own constitution
|
||
within the bounds established by Layer 1: its tone and communication
|
||
style, its content moderation norms, its decision-making model
|
||
(consensus, majority, delegated), its privacy and transparency
|
||
settings, its cultural protocols, its AI-assistance boundaries. This
|
||
layer embodies Berlin’s value pluralism in practice: different
|
||
communities have legitimately different values, and the platform
|
||
accommodates that diversity rather than imposing homogeneity. A
|
||
family village and a conservation village serve different kinds of
|
||
community and are constituted differently because their values are
|
||
different. The platform does not treat that difference as a bug to
|
||
be resolved; it treats it as the primary distribution of authority
|
||
in the system.</p>
|
||
<p><strong>Layer 3 — Member personal preferences
|
||
(individual).</strong> Individual members configure their own
|
||
preferences within the bounds of their community’s constitution:
|
||
notification frequency, language preferences, AI-assistance levels,
|
||
privacy defaults for their own content. Layer 3 preferences yield to
|
||
Layer 2 community standards, which yield to Layer 1 universal
|
||
principles. Layer 3 also accommodates a documented system of
|
||
thirteen wisdom traditions (Simone Weil on attention, Stoicism, Care
|
||
Ethics, Confucian, Buddhist, Ubuntu, Jewish, Islamic, Māori, and
|
||
others) that shape <em>how</em> AI assistance is framed and
|
||
delivered, without ever overriding the structural protections of
|
||
Layers 1 and 2.<a href="#fn37" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref37"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>37</sup></a></p>
|
||
<p>The architecture operationalises values stickiness. A
|
||
drift-inducing pressure — a commercial incentive to reduce privacy,
|
||
a personnel change replacing a founder with an engagement-optimised
|
||
successor, or a competitive imitation that nudges the platform
|
||
toward Silicon Valley defaults — cannot express itself as a policy
|
||
change that leaves the code untouched. To drift, the platform must
|
||
modify Layer 1, and Layer 1 is hardcoded. A platform seeking to
|
||
drift from its commitments has three options: modify the code, fork
|
||
the code and operate a different platform, or accept the constraint.
|
||
The first is publicly visible; the second is an exit; the third is
|
||
the intended outcome. The architecture does not render drift
|
||
metaphysically impossible. It renders drift visible, costly, and
|
||
traceable — which is the most any structural commitment can do.</p>
|
||
<h3 id="why-this-matters-for-the-research-programme">2.5 Why this
|
||
matters for the research programme</h3>
|
||
<p>The Blockx research programme diagnoses the welfare pathology
|
||
that arises when platform power is exercised against the interests
|
||
of ecosystem participants who have no market defence against it. Its
|
||
three-function model is a tool for locating <em>where</em> the
|
||
pathology is being produced: at the gatekeeper function (extractive
|
||
pricing, lock-in), at the legislator function (unilateral
|
||
rule-writing with no participant voice), at the contractual-actor
|
||
function (conflict of interest as both party and rule-setter). Li’s
|
||
distributive-equity extension asks about the resulting welfare
|
||
distribution and proposes a candidate additional consideration for
|
||
antitrust analysis.</p>
|
||
<p>This paper’s claim is that the pathology these analyses identify
|
||
is best understood as <em>the predictable consequence of values
|
||
drift in a post-Weberian organisational form</em>. The three
|
||
functions are the three places where drift shows up; the
|
||
distributive inequality is the phenomenon that drift produces. The
|
||
research programme is developing an analytical response. Village is
|
||
developing an architectural response. The two projects share the
|
||
same concern — that platform power must be constrained by values
|
||
that go beyond market efficiency — and they are developing different
|
||
mechanisms for that constraint. The overlap is at the values layer,
|
||
not only at the structural layer. The structural commitments that
|
||
Sections 3 (the platform) and 4 (the AI substrate) document,
|
||
together with the mappings in Sections 6 and 7 and the audit
|
||
criteria in Section 8, are not the paper’s thesis. They are the
|
||
enactment of the thesis. The thesis is that values stickiness is
|
||
achievable as architecture, that Village’s Tractatus framework is
|
||
one such architecture, and that at sub-Big-Tech community scale the
|
||
architecture is auditable from primary-source artifacts without the
|
||
platform disclosing confidential commercial information.</p>
|
||
<hr />
|
||
<h2 id="section-3-village-as-the-case">Section 3 — Village as the
|
||
case</h2>
|
||
<p>This section documents the platform’s scope, scale, and
|
||
architectural commitments with the specificity a reader needs to
|
||
assess the worked example. The commitments described here are the
|
||
enactment of the Tractatus framework from Section 2. Each is
|
||
verifiable from the public artifact cited in Section 8.</p>
|
||
<h3 id="scale-scope-and-stage">3.1 Scale, scope, and stage</h3>
|
||
<p>Village serves a sub-Big-Tech audience by design. Each community
|
||
is capped at 200 members by architectural ceiling; the starting
|
||
configuration is 25 members and growth to 200 requires an explicit
|
||
add-on subscription. Communities beyond 200 members are directed
|
||
toward bilateral federation with other Villages rather than
|
||
unlimited growth within a single tenant.<a href="#fn38"
|
||
class="footnote-ref" id="fnref38"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>38</sup></a> The paper makes no claim about
|
||
Village’s applicability at platform scales larger than the
|
||
200-member-per-community ceiling; it is a worked example at
|
||
community scale, not at platform scale in the Big Tech sense. The
|
||
200-member cap is itself a values-stickiness commitment: the
|
||
platform cannot become the hub for a large network because it
|
||
structurally refuses to scale any single community past that
|
||
ceiling, and the scale-driven drift pressures that push larger
|
||
platforms toward extractive practices are structurally unavailable
|
||
to Village.</p>
|
||
<p>The platform currently supports twelve product types — community,
|
||
family, whānau, governance, committee, membership, business,
|
||
episcopal, carpool, conservation, diaspora, and clubs — each
|
||
reconfiguring the interface vocabulary, default governance
|
||
structures, and feature emphasis via a vocabulary system that
|
||
operates over a single codebase. The implication for a values
|
||
analysis is that Village’s distributional commitments are made at
|
||
the architectural layer, not per product. A whānau village and a
|
||
conservation village are served by the same Layer 1 invariants, the
|
||
same flat-pricing commitment, and the same constitutional
|
||
self-binding. The pluralism is at Layer 2.</p>
|
||
<p>The operating company is My Digital Sovereignty Ltd, a
|
||
single-founder New Zealand private limited company. The founder is
|
||
74 years old and has publicly named this as a structural weakness
|
||
that the company’s planned Charitable Trust — provisionally named
|
||
<em>Te Puna Rangatiratanga</em> (The Sovereignty Foundation) — is
|
||
intended to remediate. AI assistance (Claude, from Anthropic) is
|
||
disclosed as part of the company’s operational capacity and
|
||
documented on the company’s <em>About</em> page.</p>
|
||
<h3 id="architectural-commitments">3.2 Architectural
|
||
commitments</h3>
|
||
<p>Each commitment named here is verifiable from the public artifact
|
||
cited. The structural audit table in Section 8 formalises the
|
||
verification methodology.</p>
|
||
<p><strong>Architectural tenant isolation.</strong> Each Village is
|
||
architecturally isolated from every other Village. Isolation is
|
||
enforced at the data-access layer by a tenant-filter plugin applied
|
||
automatically to every database query. Cross-tenant queries are
|
||
refused as a design invariant and the refusal is enforced in the
|
||
code path, not only in policy. This is a Layer 1 universal principle
|
||
and is not a feature that can be disabled by an administrator or a
|
||
future owner without a code change visible in the public
|
||
repository.</p>
|
||
<p><strong>Flat per-community pricing with no per-seat
|
||
extraction.</strong> Village charges a flat price per community
|
||
rather than per member, with a founding programme offering a 50%
|
||
permanent rate reduction to early communities, contractually bound
|
||
not to increase. There is no per-seat fee, no per-message fee, and
|
||
no tier gated behind member count below the design ceiling. The
|
||
platform’s commercial interest is therefore in member retention at
|
||
the community level, not in extracting from growth within the
|
||
ecosystem. Removing the gatekeeper-function incentive to extract
|
||
from growth is a values-stickiness commitment expressed through the
|
||
pricing architecture.</p>
|
||
<p><strong>Member cap by design; federation for scale.</strong>
|
||
Communities grow to 200 members via add-ons, beyond which expansion
|
||
occurs through federation rather than monolithic growth. The
|
||
200-member cap is a deliberate sub-Big-Tech design choice.
|
||
Federation between communities is structured as a bilateral contract
|
||
between the two communities, with the platform providing
|
||
infrastructure but not a counterparty position.</p>
|
||
<p><strong>Vendor sovereignty.</strong> Village’s runtime
|
||
infrastructure is outside United States jurisdiction. Production
|
||
servers run on OVH (France) for European tenants and Catalyst Cloud
|
||
(Porirua, New Zealand) for Oceania and Asia-Pacific tenants. The
|
||
payment provider is Airwallex (NZ) Limited. The operator does not
|
||
use Stripe, Google Cloud, AWS, Microsoft Azure, Cloudflare, or any
|
||
other US-domiciled runtime service. The US CLOUD Act extends
|
||
US-authority jurisdiction to US-owned infrastructure worldwide; by
|
||
choosing non-US runtime services, the platform places the data it
|
||
holds outside that jurisdictional reach as a structural matter
|
||
rather than as a matter of legal argument.</p>
|
||
<p><strong>Constitutional self-binding.</strong> My Digital
|
||
Sovereignty Ltd publishes a versioned, multilingual constitution as
|
||
the platform’s primary self-limiting instrument.<a href="#fn39"
|
||
class="footnote-ref" id="fnref39"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>39</sup></a> The current version (1.2.0,
|
||
effective 2025-11-20) is published in English, German, French,
|
||
Dutch, and te reo Māori. The constitution makes explicit what the
|
||
platform commits to and what it refuses to do — including refusals
|
||
around data sale, model training on member content, behavioural
|
||
tracking, proprietary lock-in, and content access by platform
|
||
administrators. A summary of the operator’s six core principles is
|
||
also published on the <em>Values</em> page,<a href="#fn40"
|
||
class="footnote-ref" id="fnref40"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>40</sup></a> and a shorter overview of the
|
||
philosophical positions under the four themes of human agency, data
|
||
sovereignty, community first, and radical transparency is published
|
||
on the <em>Philosophy</em> page.<a href="#fn41" class="footnote-ref"
|
||
id="fnref41" role="doc-noteref"><sup>41</sup></a></p>
|
||
<p><strong>Full data portability and exit rights.</strong> Members
|
||
and communities can leave at any time, taking their data with them
|
||
in open formats. The deletion commitment in the constitution
|
||
specifies that when content is deleted, it is removed from
|
||
production databases, backups, and AI systems — not flagged as
|
||
“deleted” while still persisting somewhere accessible. Exit and
|
||
deletion are published commitments backed by code that is reviewable
|
||
in the repository.</p>
|
||
<h3 id="governance-posture-and-planned-commitments">3.3 Governance
|
||
posture and planned commitments</h3>
|
||
<p>Three commitments are published as <em>intention</em> rather than
|
||
<em>accomplished fact</em> and are disclosed as such.</p>
|
||
<p><strong>Charitable Trust (planned).</strong> The operator has
|
||
reserved the name <em>Te Puna Rangatiratanga</em> and has prepared a
|
||
constitutional framework for a New Zealand Charitable Trust that
|
||
would hold the constitution, the Tractatus governance framework, and
|
||
succession protocols. Formal establishment is contingent on the
|
||
maturation of relationships that would give the Trust genuine
|
||
governance depth rather than a legal shell; it is explicitly not yet
|
||
incorporated.</p>
|
||
<p><strong>Technical Advisory Board (planned).</strong> The operator
|
||
has published the mandate for an independent Technical Advisory
|
||
Board with a commitment that at least 50% of seats will be reserved
|
||
for indigenous or Global South representation. The Board is in
|
||
formation; no members have been publicly named, and the operator’s
|
||
published position is that the Board will be announced only when it
|
||
has sufficient depth to be credible.</p>
|
||
<p><strong>Community governance voice (planned).</strong> Mechanisms
|
||
for Village subscribers to have voice in platform governance,
|
||
weighted by cumulative subscription contribution, are published as a
|
||
concept under development and explicitly not yet built. The
|
||
operator’s current public position is that this mechanism is more
|
||
likely to be developed in collaboration with Māori governance
|
||
researchers than in isolation.</p>
|
||
<p>Public disclosure of planning status is itself a
|
||
values-stickiness move: each planned commitment, if built, addresses
|
||
a Layer 1 concern that the architecture alone cannot yet resolve.
|
||
Readers are invited to judge Village on both the enacted
|
||
architecture and the candour of the planned extensions.</p>
|
||
<hr />
|
||
<h2
|
||
id="section-4-the-ai-substrate-village-ai-as-a-situated-language-layer">Section
|
||
4 — The AI substrate: Village AI as a Situated Language Layer</h2>
|
||
<h3 id="why-the-ai-substrate-matters-for-the-thesis">4.1 Why the AI
|
||
substrate matters for the thesis</h3>
|
||
<p>The structural commitments documented in Section 3 describe the
|
||
<em>platform</em> side of Village. A reader might reasonably ask
|
||
whether the argument stops there. It does not, and cannot, for a
|
||
reason specific to the present moment: the platform is operated
|
||
through artificial-intelligence systems, and those systems are
|
||
themselves an enactment layer at which values can drift or be held
|
||
sticky. A platform whose constitutional architecture bound its human
|
||
operators but left its AI substrate unconstrained would be a
|
||
platform whose values stickiness was partial at best. The question
|
||
the research programme is developing analytical tools for — whether
|
||
platform power is exercised against the welfare of structurally
|
||
dependent participants — is increasingly a question about the <em>AI
|
||
that mediates the platform’s interaction with its participants</em>,
|
||
not only about the business logic written in traditional code.</p>
|
||
<p>This section documents what Village has done at the AI substrate.
|
||
It is drawn substantively from Article 5 of the operator’s published
|
||
<em>AI Governance for Communities</em> series, <em>Village AI as a
|
||
Situated Language Layer</em> (April 2026),<a href="#fn42"
|
||
class="footnote-ref" id="fnref42"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>42</sup></a> which sets out the design
|
||
principles, architecture, governance framework, training
|
||
methodology, and security posture of the AI component of the
|
||
platform. The purpose of this section is not to reproduce Article 5
|
||
in full but to situate it inside the values-stickiness argument of
|
||
Section 2 and to make explicit what a reader of the research
|
||
programme should take from it.</p>
|
||
<h3 id="what-a-situated-language-layer-is">4.2 What a Situated
|
||
Language Layer is</h3>
|
||
<p>Article 5 introduces the term <em>Situated Language Layer</em>
|
||
(SLL) to name a small, locally-trained language model that runs on
|
||
community-controlled infrastructure. The article is specific about
|
||
the choice of word: <em>“in philosophy, situated knowledge refers to
|
||
understanding that emerges from a particular context, shaped by
|
||
specific relationships, histories, and values. A Situated Language
|
||
Layer is AI that knows where it is, whom it serves, and what it
|
||
should not do — because the community that trained it made those
|
||
decisions explicitly.”</em><a href="#fn43" class="footnote-ref"
|
||
id="fnref43" role="doc-noteref"><sup>43</sup></a> The qualifier
|
||
<em>small</em> is likewise deliberate: <em>“a model small enough to
|
||
run on modest hardware is a model the community can actually
|
||
control. A model trained on community content, with community
|
||
consent, under community governance, is a model whose behaviour the
|
||
community can inspect, adjust, and hold accountable.”</em></p>
|
||
<p>The architecture is described in Article 5 at a governance level
|
||
rather than a technical one. The relevant elements for the present
|
||
paper are five.</p>
|
||
<p><strong>Open-weight foundation model.</strong> The Village AI
|
||
begins from an open-weight foundation — currently the
|
||
14-billion-parameter Qwen2 family from Alibaba, selected after
|
||
evaluation on the grounds that the model weights can be inspected by
|
||
auditors, that the model runs on community-owned hardware without
|
||
dependency on any single vendor, and that the model can be
|
||
fine-tuned without the developer’s permission or knowledge. Article
|
||
5 documents that the choice of foundation model has already been
|
||
revised once in practice: Village initially used Meta’s Llama family
|
||
before migrating to Qwen2 on the basis of superior multilingual
|
||
performance, particularly for te reo Māori and the European
|
||
languages the platform supports. The choice of foundation is itself
|
||
a governance decision, and the operator treats it as one.</p>
|
||
<p><strong>Parameter-efficient fine-tuning adapters.</strong> On top
|
||
of the open-weight foundation, Village adds thin adapter layers
|
||
produced through parameter-efficient fine-tuning. Each adapter
|
||
encodes community values, governance boundaries, and domain
|
||
knowledge specific to its community type. Article 5 notes three
|
||
governance advantages of this approach: adapters are dramatically
|
||
cheaper to train than full models, making community-sovereign AI
|
||
economically viable at community scale; adapters can be updated when
|
||
community values evolve without retraining from scratch; and
|
||
adapters can be reverted instantly if a training run produces
|
||
undesirable behaviour. Reversibility is itself a values-stickiness
|
||
property: a platform whose AI cannot be rolled back has an AI that
|
||
will drift faster than its governance processes can correct.</p>
|
||
<p><strong>Per-product-type specialisation.</strong> Village does
|
||
not run a single AI model serving every tenant. Article 5 documents
|
||
that the platform deploys per-product-type specialised models, each
|
||
fine-tuned on the specific vocabulary, governance structures, and
|
||
cultural context of its community type. Nine specialisations are in
|
||
production at the time Article 5 was published: whānau, episcopal,
|
||
community, family, business, and four further specialisations
|
||
triggered only when the first real tenant of that type exists
|
||
(conservation, diaspora, clubs, alumni). A 14B community model
|
||
serves as the fallback for any product type without its own
|
||
specialisation, and routing is handled by an InferenceRouter that
|
||
selects the correct model based on the requesting tenant’s product
|
||
type. Article 5 is explicit that this is a governance design, not
|
||
simply a performance optimisation: <em>“each community gets the
|
||
model trained on content most like its own, not a one-size-fits-all
|
||
general assistant.”</em></p>
|
||
<p><strong>Data sovereignty as an architectural constraint.</strong>
|
||
Community content stays on community infrastructure. Training data
|
||
is drawn from the community’s own content, stored on its own
|
||
infrastructure. No queries, responses, or usage data are transmitted
|
||
to external systems. Article 5 treats this not as a policy that
|
||
could be changed through a settings menu but as an architectural
|
||
constraint: <em>“the community can verify these claims because the
|
||
entire system is auditable.”</em></p>
|
||
<p><strong>Graceful degradation.</strong> The routing infrastructure
|
||
supports fallback from the primary GPU endpoint to a CPU-served
|
||
model at reduced quality rather than failing silently, and the
|
||
community is told when this happens. Transparency about capability
|
||
limitations is itself a governance commitment in Article 5’s
|
||
framing.</p>
|
||
<h3 id="the-ai-substrate-subjected-to-the-tractatus-framework">4.3
|
||
The AI substrate subjected to the Tractatus framework</h3>
|
||
<p>The structural commitments in Section 2.3 and Section 2.4 apply
|
||
to the AI substrate as surely as they apply to the platform logic.
|
||
This subsection makes the correspondences explicit.</p>
|
||
<p><strong>Layer 1 hard red lines are enforced in the AI
|
||
itself.</strong> Article 5 lists four hard red lines that are
|
||
embedded as architectural constraints rather than as guidelines that
|
||
might be overridden: the AI must not make decisions for people; the
|
||
AI must not build behavioural profiles of members; the AI must not
|
||
optimise for engagement; and the AI must not disclose one member’s
|
||
content to another without authorisation. Each of these maps to a
|
||
Tractatus Layer 1 invariant documented in Section 2.4 of this paper.
|
||
The first corresponds to the Wittgensteinian sayable/unsayable
|
||
boundary (Section 2.3) — values and value-laden decisions are
|
||
unsayable in the Tractatus sense and therefore cannot be delegated
|
||
to machines. The second and fourth correspond to the
|
||
tenant-isolation and no-cross-tenant-surveillance invariants that
|
||
are also enforced in the platform’s data-access layer. The third
|
||
corresponds to the operator’s refusal to adopt an engagement
|
||
objective function, which is a direct consequence of Berlin’s value
|
||
pluralism — as Section 2.3 describes, a system optimising across
|
||
incommensurable values is imposing a hidden hierarchy, and Village’s
|
||
refusal to optimise for engagement is the AI-layer expression of
|
||
that refusal.</p>
|
||
<p><strong>Guardian Agents verify AI output in a different epistemic
|
||
domain from generation.</strong> This is the direct operational
|
||
consequence of Wittgenstein’s sayable / unsayable distinction as
|
||
Section 2.3 describes it. The Guardian Agents documented in
|
||
<em>Guardian Agents and the Philosophy of AI Accountability</em><a
|
||
href="#fn44" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref44"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>44</sup></a> verify AI output using
|
||
embedding similarity, not additional generative inference.
|
||
Measurement, not classification. The architecture is such that the
|
||
AI component that generates responses operates in a domain that
|
||
necessarily touches the unsayable, while the component that verifies
|
||
those responses operates entirely in the sayable. The verifier is
|
||
not another speaker — it is a measuring instrument. This is values
|
||
stickiness at the inference layer.</p>
|
||
<p><strong>Per-community adapters are the Layer 2 enactment at the
|
||
AI substrate.</strong> Just as each Village defines its own Layer 2
|
||
community constitution within the Layer 1 universal bounds described
|
||
in Section 2.4, each Village has its own adapter that encodes the
|
||
community’s values, cultural protocols, and governance boundaries
|
||
into the AI behaviour. Per-product-type specialisation is pluralism
|
||
operationalised at the AI substrate: a family village’s AI is not a
|
||
policy layer on top of a one-size-fits-all model, it is a
|
||
differently-trained model whose training-time decisions reflect the
|
||
family village’s values. This is the AI-layer answer to Berlin’s
|
||
point in Section 2.3 that no objective function resolves value
|
||
conflicts across incommensurable values: Village does not run one AI
|
||
with a value hierarchy, it runs several AIs trained on different
|
||
value sets.</p>
|
||
<p><strong>Counter-training against internet-scale bias is values
|
||
stickiness applied to the training process itself.</strong> Article
|
||
5 is explicit that base models carry implicit assumptions reflecting
|
||
the demographics of the internet’s most prolific contributors, and
|
||
that these assumptions may conflict with community values. The
|
||
operator’s response, as Article 5 describes it, is explicit
|
||
counter-training rather than censorship: where the base model treats
|
||
efficiency as unconditionally desirable, fine-tuning can shift the
|
||
default so that thoroughness is valued more highly in the community
|
||
context; where the base model treats direct communication as the
|
||
preferred register, fine-tuning can shift the default so that
|
||
indirect approaches are read as respect rather than as evasion.
|
||
Article 5 frames the underlying commitment as ensuring that the AI
|
||
reflects the community’s values rather than the internet’s values,
|
||
which it describes as the values of no community in particular.<a
|
||
href="#fn45" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref45"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>45</sup></a> The choice of what to
|
||
counter-train against is itself a governance decision, documented
|
||
and audited through the community’s processes rather than delegated
|
||
to the model’s developers.</p>
|
||
<p><strong>Consent is opt-in, granular, revocable, and
|
||
informed.</strong> Article 5 describes the consent regime for AI
|
||
training on member content in exactly these four terms: opt-in
|
||
(default is exclusion), granular (members can consent to some uses
|
||
but not others), revocable (withdrawal triggers retraining without
|
||
that content), informed (clear non-technical explanations of what
|
||
training means). Each is a values-stickiness property at the
|
||
member-relationship layer: the platform cannot drift toward assuming
|
||
consent it does not have, because the code requires explicit
|
||
per-purpose consent flags before any training run includes the
|
||
content. The three AI-purpose consent classes currently documented
|
||
in the operator’s consent model are <code>ai_triage_memory</code>,
|
||
<code>ai_ocr_memory</code>, and
|
||
<code>ai_summarization_memory</code>, each of which a member may
|
||
consent to or decline separately.</p>
|
||
<h3 id="the-rate-of-ai-capability-change-as-empirical-context">4.4
|
||
The rate of AI capability change as empirical context</h3>
|
||
<p>Article 5 includes a section on security in what it calls <em>a
|
||
post-Mythos world</em>. The reference is to Anthropic’s April 2026
|
||
disclosure of a model it chose not to release publicly because, per
|
||
the disclosure, it can discover software weaknesses at scale across
|
||
every major operating system and web browser and produce functioning
|
||
intrusion code against them. The capabilities were offered through a
|
||
controlled-release programme (Project Glasswing) to approximately
|
||
forty large technology companies so they could find and patch their
|
||
own weaknesses in advance of equivalent capabilities proliferating.
|
||
Article 5 cites these facts and draws one immediate practical
|
||
implication: the ability to identify and leverage hidden software
|
||
weaknesses — previously the preserve of nation-state cyber
|
||
programmes — will, within a year or two, be reachable by anyone with
|
||
access to a sufficiently capable model. The barrier to entry falls
|
||
from millions of dollars and years of expertise to a single model
|
||
prompt.<a href="#fn46" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref46"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>46</sup></a></p>
|
||
<p>The point of citing this in the present paper is not to
|
||
editorialise about the rate of change in AI reasoning capability,
|
||
nor to predict any specific outcome. The point is narrower: <em>the
|
||
empirical fact that AI capability is changing rapidly, documented in
|
||
the primary disclosures Article 5 cites, is part of the context in
|
||
which the research programme’s analytical work is being
|
||
conducted.</em> A research programme developing legal and analytical
|
||
tools for platform power is doing so while the substrate through
|
||
which platform power is exercised — the AI that mediates between the
|
||
platform and its participants — is itself a moving target. That fact
|
||
does not settle any theoretical question, but it does establish that
|
||
the structural question — <em>who constrains the AI, how, and
|
||
through what mechanism?</em> — is a present question rather than a
|
||
future one. The operator’s view, documented across the AI Governance
|
||
for Communities series, is that architectural answers to this
|
||
question are in short supply and that values stickiness at the AI
|
||
substrate is one of the few approaches that can be implemented by a
|
||
community-scale platform without waiting for regulation or generic
|
||
safety tooling to catch up.</p>
|
||
<p>Article 5 also documents the operator’s specific security-posture
|
||
response to the post-Mythos context: dependency audits, a 48-hour
|
||
patch cycle policy, AIDE file-integrity monitoring on both
|
||
production servers, encryption at rest using AES-256-CBC, and the
|
||
continuing absence of US-cloud dependencies — which the article
|
||
argues <em>functions as a security posture in addition to a
|
||
sovereignty posture</em>, on the reasoning that <em>“a small,
|
||
well-defended target is not in the blast radius of the
|
||
mass-exploitation scenarios that Mythos-class capabilities
|
||
enable.”</em><a href="#fn47" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref47"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>47</sup></a> These are concrete operational
|
||
responses documented in the public record, not speculative
|
||
positions.</p>
|
||
<h3 id="relevance-to-the-research-programme">4.5 Relevance to the
|
||
research programme</h3>
|
||
<p>The research programme analyses platform power. A platform’s AI
|
||
substrate is increasingly the mechanism through which platform power
|
||
is exercised over ecosystem participants — the mediation layer
|
||
between the platform’s rules and the participants’ experience of
|
||
them. The question <em>“how is this platform’s AI constrained?”</em>
|
||
is therefore becoming part of <em>“how is this platform’s power
|
||
constrained?”</em>, and a paper that mapped Village’s structural
|
||
commitments onto the three-function model while leaving the AI
|
||
substrate unexamined would be mapping half of the worked
|
||
example.</p>
|
||
<p>Village’s SLL approach demonstrates one architectural answer to
|
||
the question: the AI is bound by the same constitutional
|
||
architecture the platform is bound by. The AI’s hard red lines are
|
||
Layer 1 invariants. The AI’s per-community behaviour is a Layer 2
|
||
constitutional enactment. The AI’s verification operates in a
|
||
different epistemic domain from its generation, preserving
|
||
Wittgenstein’s boundary. The AI’s training is subject to the
|
||
community’s consent and governance processes. The AI’s tendencies
|
||
are actively counter-trained against internet-scale drift. And the
|
||
whole substrate runs on community-controlled infrastructure that is
|
||
inspectable, modifiable, and, if necessary, reversible.</p>
|
||
<p>For the research programme, this is worth attention for a
|
||
specific reason: it is an existence proof that the AI substrate can
|
||
be subjected to the same values-stickiness architecture as the
|
||
platform, without waiting for external regulation or generic safety
|
||
tooling to catch up. It does not settle the question of whether that
|
||
architecture is sufficient. It does establish that the question is
|
||
not premature. As with every other claim in the paper, the
|
||
operator’s contribution is documentary rather than theoretical — the
|
||
research programme is invited to assess, critique, extend, or reject
|
||
the documented approach on its own terms.</p>
|
||
<hr />
|
||
<h2
|
||
id="section-5-māori-grounded-principles-inside-the-tractatus-pluralism-layer">Section
|
||
5 — Māori-grounded principles inside the Tractatus pluralism
|
||
layer</h2>
|
||
<p>The Tractatus framework’s pluralism commitment (from Berlin,
|
||
operationalised in the three-layer architecture of Section 2.4) is
|
||
not decoration on a Western framework. It is a substantive
|
||
commitment that one of the plural value systems the platform
|
||
accommodates is a Māori-grounded framework already in active use.
|
||
This section names the Māori-grounded principles and shows how each
|
||
is operationalised at Village as a first-class commitment rather
|
||
than a feature.</p>
|
||
<p><strong>Rangatiratanga</strong> — authority and
|
||
self-determination over one’s own domain — is the organising
|
||
principle of Layer 1 tenant isolation. A community’s data remains
|
||
under that community’s authority. The platform exercises
|
||
kaitiakitanga (guardianship), not ownership. Rangatiratanga appears
|
||
in the paper’s architectural audit as a first-class design
|
||
invariant, not as a label applied to a pre-existing technical
|
||
decision.<a href="#fn48" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref48"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>48</sup></a></p>
|
||
<p><strong>Whakapapa</strong> — relational knowledge that connects
|
||
people to each other, to their ancestors, and to their land — is
|
||
operationalised as the mentor-recognition model in Village’s support
|
||
services architecture. A mentor’s mana (standing, authority,
|
||
recognition) is visible through the lineage of villages they have
|
||
helped to establish, not through gamification badges or quantitative
|
||
metrics. The operator’s published commitment is that recognition is
|
||
allocated through whakapapa, not through metric.<a href="#fn49"
|
||
class="footnote-ref" id="fnref49"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>49</sup></a></p>
|
||
<p><strong>Whanaungatanga</strong> — kinship through shared purpose
|
||
— is the relational underpinning of the federation model. Federation
|
||
between villages is structured as a bilateral agreement between
|
||
communities that have chosen to be in relationship, not as market
|
||
clearing on a platform-managed marketplace. The platform
|
||
deliberately does not interpose itself as a transaction counterparty
|
||
in the relationships it enables.</p>
|
||
<p><strong>Kaitiakitanga</strong> — guardianship and stewardship —
|
||
is the ethical frame the operator uses to describe the founder’s
|
||
relationship to the platform during the pre-Trust period. The
|
||
founder is the current kaitiaki of the platform, with the published
|
||
intention that stewardship will transition to the planned Charitable
|
||
Trust when the Trust has sufficient governance depth to be credible
|
||
rather than symbolic.</p>
|
||
<p><strong>Koha</strong> — gift-based reciprocity — is the
|
||
operator’s published access model for indigenous communities outside
|
||
Aotearoa in the later phases of its roadmap, and reflects a values
|
||
commitment that access to the platform’s most significant services
|
||
will be decoupled from ability to pay at market rate and re-coupled
|
||
to relational contribution.<a href="#fn50" class="footnote-ref"
|
||
id="fnref50" role="doc-noteref"><sup>50</sup></a></p>
|
||
<p>They are not decoration on a Western framework; they are a
|
||
non-Western distributive framework in which welfare flows according
|
||
to relational obligation rather than market clearing, and in which
|
||
recognition is allocated through lineage rather than metric. At
|
||
sub-Big-Tech community scale, a Māori-grounded framework of this
|
||
kind operationalises many of the distributive goals the
|
||
legal-academic research programme has been developing analytical
|
||
tools for, through mechanisms that are structurally embedded in the
|
||
platform’s Layer 2 constitutional architecture.</p>
|
||
<p>The author has not earned authority in this area and makes no
|
||
claim to cultural expertise. The purpose of this section is to make
|
||
the framework legible to a legal-academic reader, to cite the
|
||
academic articulations that do carry subject-matter authority, and
|
||
to name the platform’s published commitments so that a reader with
|
||
relevant expertise can assess them.</p>
|
||
<hr />
|
||
<h2
|
||
id="section-6-the-three-function-model-as-three-places-drift-happens">Section
|
||
6 — The three-function model as three places drift happens</h2>
|
||
<p>The three-function model distinguishes the platform’s role as
|
||
gatekeeper (controlling access to the ecosystem), legislator
|
||
(writing the rules for relationships within the ecosystem), and
|
||
contractual actor (participating in transactions under those
|
||
rules).<a href="#fn51" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref51"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>51</sup></a> This paper’s claim is that each
|
||
of the three functions is a place where <em>values drift</em>
|
||
produces the ecosystem-power pathology the research programme
|
||
diagnoses. Village’s structural commitments are one enactment of a
|
||
values-stickiness response to each of the three drift sites.</p>
|
||
<h3 id="gatekeeper-function-drift-toward-extractive-access">5.1
|
||
Gatekeeper function — drift toward extractive access</h3>
|
||
<p>A platform acting as gatekeeper holds the keys to access: to
|
||
membership, to functionality, to exit, to data. The research
|
||
programme’s concern is that platforms can drift toward extractive
|
||
gatekeeping — lock-in, switching costs, barriers to exit,
|
||
differential treatment of structurally dependent participants. This
|
||
drift is not typically the consequence of an explicit decision; it
|
||
is the accumulated weight of small decisions each of which is
|
||
individually justifiable on efficiency grounds. The platform adds a
|
||
“friction” feature to reduce abuse, and the friction becomes a
|
||
barrier to exit. The platform raises prices in response to cost
|
||
pressures, and the price becomes a barrier to entry for the members
|
||
the platform was set up to serve. The drift is lawful, incremental,
|
||
and, within a Weberian knowledge hierarchy, coordinated through
|
||
procedural rationality.</p>
|
||
<p>Village’s values-stickiness response to the gatekeeper drift site
|
||
is structural: a flat per-community subscription price that does not
|
||
increase with member count, a 200-member ceiling beyond which growth
|
||
is redirected to federation rather than intensified extraction,
|
||
architectural tenant isolation that removes the cross-tenant
|
||
data-accumulation pathway that turns gatekeeping into network-effect
|
||
lock-in, and published commitments on data portability and deletion
|
||
backed by code. Each is a Layer 1 invariant. Each requires a code
|
||
change to violate. Each is visible in the repository. The gatekeeper
|
||
function’s drift has been structurally constrained, not merely
|
||
policed.</p>
|
||
<h3
|
||
id="legislator-function-drift-toward-unilateral-rule-writing">5.2
|
||
Legislator function — drift toward unilateral rule-writing</h3>
|
||
<p>A platform acting as legislator writes the rules that govern
|
||
participants’ behaviour and relationships within the ecosystem. The
|
||
research programme’s concern is that platforms write these rules
|
||
unilaterally, with no participant voice, no external constraint, and
|
||
no constraint on the platform’s own behaviour as rule-writer. The
|
||
drift pattern at this function is the progressive reduction of
|
||
participant voice in rule-setting and the progressive expansion of
|
||
platform discretion — not through any single decision, but through
|
||
the accumulation of small rule changes each of which individually
|
||
seems reasonable.</p>
|
||
<p>Village’s values-stickiness response to the legislator drift site
|
||
is the constitutional self-binding published in the operator’s
|
||
constitution and the three-layer constitutional architecture that
|
||
pins platform rule-making behind a layered authority system. The
|
||
operator’s Layer 1 universal principles are not a policy document
|
||
that the operator can amend at will. They are the hardcoded
|
||
invariants of the platform, and any change requires a code change
|
||
that is visible in the repository. The operator’s pluralism
|
||
commitment — that different communities have legitimately different
|
||
values, and that the platform will not impose a single value
|
||
hierarchy across communities — is itself a Layer 1 invariant, which
|
||
means that the operator has structurally foreclosed its own capacity
|
||
to drift toward Silicon-Valley default homogenisation under
|
||
competitive pressure. The legislator function’s drift has been
|
||
structurally constrained by binding the legislator to the
|
||
constitution that generated it.</p>
|
||
<h3 id="contractual-actor-function-drift-toward-role-conflict">5.3
|
||
Contractual-actor function — drift toward role conflict</h3>
|
||
<p>A platform acting as contractual actor is simultaneously party to
|
||
transactions and rule-setter for those transactions. The research
|
||
programme’s concern is that this creates an unaddressable conflict
|
||
of interest: the platform can rewrite the rules of transactions it
|
||
is party to. The drift pattern at this function is the progressive
|
||
capture of the rule-writing authority by the contractual-actor role
|
||
— the platform writes rules that favour its own transactions and
|
||
discloses nothing until the conflict has fully crystallised.</p>
|
||
<p>Village’s values-stickiness response to the contractual-actor
|
||
drift site is to deliberately restrict the platform’s
|
||
contractual-actor role. The platform’s direct contractual
|
||
relationships are only two: the subscription relationship between
|
||
the operator and the community (flat price, founding rate lock,
|
||
published terms), and the federation relationship between the
|
||
platform and any federated community the platform itself
|
||
participates in as a Village (currently none). The platform
|
||
deliberately does not insert itself as the contractual counterparty
|
||
in member-to-member or community-to-community interactions.
|
||
Federation between communities is a bilateral contract between the
|
||
two communities, with the platform providing infrastructure but not
|
||
a counterparty position. The drift pattern cannot play out because
|
||
the role conflict is structurally foreclosed — the platform’s code
|
||
does not support the transaction patterns that would produce the
|
||
conflict.</p>
|
||
<p>In each of the three functions, the research programme has
|
||
diagnosed a drift pathology; in each case, Village has
|
||
architecturally foreclosed the drift pattern by binding the
|
||
platform’s behaviour to a Layer 1 invariant that it cannot
|
||
unilaterally amend. The three-function map is therefore not a
|
||
mechanical correspondence between Village’s structure and the three
|
||
functions. It is a statement of values alignment: the Blockx
|
||
research programme and the Village project respond to a shared
|
||
concern, and differ only in the mechanism of response — the research
|
||
programme develops analytical and legal instruments, Village
|
||
develops architectural and constitutional ones.</p>
|
||
<hr />
|
||
<h2
|
||
id="section-7-distributive-equity-as-a-consequence-of-values-stickiness">Section
|
||
7 — Distributive equity as a consequence of values stickiness</h2>
|
||
<p>The distributive-equity framing asks whether welfare generated by
|
||
a platform’s ecosystem is fairly allocated among the stakeholder
|
||
groups within the ecosystem.<a href="#fn52" class="footnote-ref"
|
||
id="fnref52" role="doc-noteref"><sup>52</sup></a> This paper’s claim
|
||
is that <em>distributive equity is the welfare shape that a
|
||
values-sticky platform produces</em>. If a platform’s architecture
|
||
prevents the gatekeeper-function drift that extracts from growth,
|
||
the gatekeeper-function welfare flows to participants rather than to
|
||
the platform. If the architecture prevents the legislator-function
|
||
drift toward unilateral rule-writing, the legislator-function
|
||
welfare is distributed across tenants rather than captured by the
|
||
platform. If the architecture prevents the contractual-actor drift
|
||
toward role conflict, the contractual-actor welfare is distributed
|
||
across the participants to the relationships rather than extracted
|
||
by the platform as rule-setter. Distributive equity is not a
|
||
separate goal the platform additionally pursues. It is the
|
||
predictable consequence of the platform’s values stickiness, once
|
||
the values in question include the welfare of ecosystem
|
||
participants.</p>
|
||
<h3 id="stakeholder-groups-at-villages-scale">6.1 Stakeholder groups
|
||
at Village’s scale</h3>
|
||
<p>Five groups are relevant at Village’s scale and stage:</p>
|
||
<ol type="1">
|
||
<li><strong>Operator.</strong> My Digital Sovereignty Ltd.</li>
|
||
<li><strong>Communities (tenant villages).</strong> The
|
||
25-to-200-member units that subscribe to and operate on the
|
||
platform.</li>
|
||
<li><strong>Members.</strong> The individual people who belong to a
|
||
community.</li>
|
||
<li><strong>Moderators and mentors.</strong> Community members who
|
||
carry additional responsibility, and (under the tuakana-teina
|
||
roadmap) mentors who help other communities establish
|
||
themselves.</li>
|
||
<li><strong>Federation partners.</strong> Other communities
|
||
connected via bilateral federation contracts.</li>
|
||
</ol>
|
||
<h3 id="distributional-commitments-per-group">6.2 Distributional
|
||
commitments per group</h3>
|
||
<p><strong>Operator.</strong> The operator’s distributional
|
||
commitment is the <em>Sustainable Business Model</em> principle of
|
||
the published constitution: Village charges what it costs to run the
|
||
service sustainably, plus reasonable profit, and refuses to sell
|
||
advertising, data, or feature access. Founder compensation, runway,
|
||
and any cross-customer subsidies are not currently disclosed. The
|
||
published intention is that at Charitable Trust formation, the
|
||
operator-level distribution will become subject to trustee
|
||
governance rather than founder-only control. The current state is
|
||
stage-appropriate confidentiality disclosed as such; the gap is that
|
||
operator-level welfare distribution depends on founder good-faith
|
||
until the Trust is formed.</p>
|
||
<p><strong>Communities.</strong> Communities receive flat
|
||
per-community pricing with a permanent founding rate, full control
|
||
over their own data and governance, the right to exit at any time
|
||
with data portability, a hard architectural member cap that protects
|
||
the community’s scale, the pluralism commitment that the operator
|
||
will not impose values on the community, and the published refusal
|
||
to sell community data, train models on community content without
|
||
consent, or use community information to benefit other customers.
|
||
The gap: communities do not yet have formal voice in platform-level
|
||
decisions. Community governance voice is published as a concept
|
||
under development and is not yet built.</p>
|
||
<p><strong>Members.</strong> Individual members receive no per-head
|
||
extraction, full data ownership including open-format export, a
|
||
deletion guarantee covering production, backups, and AI systems,
|
||
consent-based AI interaction with time-bounded memory retention,
|
||
protection against behavioural tracking and advertising-driven
|
||
engagement optimisation, and the right to leave without penalty.
|
||
Member-level structural commitments are in production today. The
|
||
author does not identify a specific member-level gap at this stage,
|
||
though verification of the deletion guarantee is a task for an
|
||
external auditor rather than the operator.</p>
|
||
<p><strong>Moderators and mentors.</strong> Moderators operating
|
||
under the tuakana-teina framework receive recognition through
|
||
whakapapa (lineage of communities helped), koha-based reciprocity in
|
||
the later roadmap phases, and a published commitment to a Māori-led
|
||
professional-services pathway in the final phase of the roadmap.
|
||
Phase 1 is in production; Phases 2 through 5 are roadmapped but not
|
||
yet built. The gap: mentor-level welfare distribution currently
|
||
depends on Phase 1 and on the good-faith of the operator’s
|
||
commitment to roadmap the later phases.</p>
|
||
<p><strong>Federation partners.</strong> Federation is structured as
|
||
a bilateral contract with explicit termination terms, layered
|
||
consent, and exit rights. The 200-member cap structurally prevents
|
||
federation asymmetries arising from one community being orders of
|
||
magnitude larger than another. Formal asymmetric-protection clauses
|
||
for cases where a federation partner has significantly different
|
||
resource capacity are not yet present; the cap does most of the
|
||
work, but the gap is named.</p>
|
||
<h3 id="where-commitment-depends-on-founder-good-faith">6.3 Where
|
||
commitment depends on founder good-faith</h3>
|
||
<p>Three commitments are not yet structurally enforced and depend on
|
||
the current single-founder governance:</p>
|
||
<ol type="1">
|
||
<li>Operator-level welfare distribution before Trust formation.</li>
|
||
<li>Community governance voice in platform-level decisions.</li>
|
||
<li>Long-term stewardship transition beyond the single founder’s
|
||
active period.</li>
|
||
</ol>
|
||
<p>The author names these explicitly because a values-alignment
|
||
analysis that ignored them would be incomplete. The published
|
||
roadmap addresses all three — Charitable Trust formation for (1) and
|
||
(3), community-governance-voice mechanisms and the Technical
|
||
Advisory Board for (2) — but none has been completed at the time of
|
||
writing. The paper does not claim the gaps are solved; it claims
|
||
they are named, published, and committed to as future work. The
|
||
disclosure is itself part of the values-stickiness posture: a
|
||
sticky-values platform discloses its own unfinished work so that the
|
||
drift from intention to accomplishment can be tracked publicly.</p>
|
||
<hr />
|
||
<h2 id="section-8-structural-audit-criteria">Section 8 — Structural
|
||
audit criteria</h2>
|
||
<p>The paper’s core hypothesis is that a values-sticky platform’s
|
||
commitments can be audited at sub-Big-Tech scale from public
|
||
primary-source artifacts, without the platform disclosing
|
||
confidential commercial or financial information. This section
|
||
formalises the audit modality as a table of checkable claims, each
|
||
with the public artifact that evidences it and a falsification path
|
||
a reader could use to test the claim independently.</p>
|
||
<table>
|
||
<colgroup>
|
||
<col style="width: 25%" />
|
||
<col style="width: 25%" />
|
||
<col style="width: 25%" />
|
||
<col style="width: 25%" />
|
||
</colgroup>
|
||
<thead>
|
||
<tr class="header">
|
||
<th>Claim</th>
|
||
<th>Verification artifact</th>
|
||
<th>Public?</th>
|
||
<th>Falsifiable how</th>
|
||
</tr>
|
||
</thead>
|
||
<tbody>
|
||
<tr class="odd">
|
||
<td>Constitutional self-binding with version history</td>
|
||
<td>Constitution V1.2.0, effective 2025-11-20, published in five
|
||
languages at the operator’s constitutional URL</td>
|
||
<td>Yes</td>
|
||
<td>Read the document; compare language across translations; check
|
||
archive services for version history</td>
|
||
</tr>
|
||
<tr class="even">
|
||
<td>Three-layer constitutional architecture (Layer 1 immutable,
|
||
Layer 2 tenant, Layer 3 member)</td>
|
||
<td>Philosophical foundations document; constitution; tenant
|
||
settings; member-preference interface</td>
|
||
<td>Yes</td>
|
||
<td>Inspect the constitutional text; attempt to override a Layer 1
|
||
invariant at Layer 2; observe rejection</td>
|
||
</tr>
|
||
<tr class="odd">
|
||
<td>Tractatus framework (philosophical foundations)</td>
|
||
<td>Published philosophical foundations document; Guardian Agents
|
||
philosophy article; Tractatus framework repository</td>
|
||
<td>Yes</td>
|
||
<td>Read the documents; verify that cited theorists are reflected in
|
||
the architectural decisions</td>
|
||
</tr>
|
||
<tr class="even">
|
||
<td>Flat per-community pricing, no per-seat fees, founding-rate
|
||
lock</td>
|
||
<td>Pricing page and subscription product configuration in payment
|
||
provider (Airwallex)</td>
|
||
<td>Yes</td>
|
||
<td>Attempt subscription flow; observe billing structure; verify
|
||
absence of per-seat scaling</td>
|
||
</tr>
|
||
<tr class="odd">
|
||
<td>Vendor sovereignty (no US-jurisdiction runtime services)</td>
|
||
<td>Operator’s publicly stated vendor policy, infrastructure
|
||
documentation, observable outbound traffic from production</td>
|
||
<td>Partially (at code-review and traffic-observation level)</td>
|
||
<td>Inspect dependencies in public code; capture production outbound
|
||
traffic; verify absence of calls to US-jurisdiction services</td>
|
||
</tr>
|
||
<tr class="even">
|
||
<td>Architectural tenant isolation (cross-tenant queries
|
||
refused)</td>
|
||
<td>Tenant-filter plugin applied at the data-access layer,
|
||
documented as a design invariant in engineering guidelines</td>
|
||
<td>Partially (at code-review level)</td>
|
||
<td>Code review of the data-access layer; attempt a tenant-A context
|
||
query for tenant-B data; verify rejection</td>
|
||
</tr>
|
||
<tr class="odd">
|
||
<td>Exit rights and open-format data portability</td>
|
||
<td>Data-export endpoints in the public API and constitutional
|
||
commitment in Principle 1</td>
|
||
<td>Yes</td>
|
||
<td>Attempt an export; verify open-format output; verify
|
||
completeness</td>
|
||
</tr>
|
||
<tr class="even">
|
||
<td>Deletion guarantee (production, backups, AI systems)</td>
|
||
<td>Constitutional commitment in <em>Sovereignty First</em>;
|
||
operational procedures documented in engineering guidelines</td>
|
||
<td>Partially (claim public, enforcement requires audit)</td>
|
||
<td>Request deletion as a member; request verification of removal
|
||
from all three classes; assess whether the operator can evidence
|
||
completeness</td>
|
||
</tr>
|
||
<tr class="odd">
|
||
<td>200-member architectural ceiling, federation as expansion
|
||
path</td>
|
||
<td>Pricing page language, federation page bilateral-contract
|
||
template</td>
|
||
<td>Yes</td>
|
||
<td>Attempt to add a 201st member; verify the attempt fails or
|
||
triggers federation</td>
|
||
</tr>
|
||
<tr class="even">
|
||
<td>Twelve product types served by a single codebase</td>
|
||
<td>Public vocabulary system described on the plan page;
|
||
product-type configuration in code</td>
|
||
<td>Yes</td>
|
||
<td>Inspect the vocabulary configuration; sign up to two different
|
||
product types; verify the vocabulary differences are served by the
|
||
same codebase</td>
|
||
</tr>
|
||
<tr class="odd">
|
||
<td>Guardian Agents in production (Layer 1 enforcement of the
|
||
sayable / unsayable boundary)</td>
|
||
<td>Published Guardian Agents articles; operator’s production
|
||
monitoring dashboards</td>
|
||
<td>Yes (articles) / Partial (production evidence)</td>
|
||
<td>Read the published Guardian Agents articles; inspect production
|
||
behaviour at the operator’s dashboards</td>
|
||
</tr>
|
||
<tr class="even">
|
||
<td>Six moral frameworks and pluralistic deliberation</td>
|
||
<td>Published philosophical foundations document;
|
||
PluralisticDeliberator service in the Tractatus repository</td>
|
||
<td>Yes</td>
|
||
<td>Read the document; inspect the service code in the
|
||
repository</td>
|
||
</tr>
|
||
<tr class="odd">
|
||
<td>Tuakana-teina Phase 1 in production (four support channels)</td>
|
||
<td>Published support services article; help widget in every
|
||
Village; briefing document; feedback channel; introductory video
|
||
session booking flow</td>
|
||
<td>Yes</td>
|
||
<td>Visit a live Village; use each of the four channels; observe
|
||
operation</td>
|
||
</tr>
|
||
<tr class="even">
|
||
<td>Charitable Trust planned, not yet incorporated (<em>Te Puna
|
||
Rangatiratanga</em>)</td>
|
||
<td>Operator’s plan page; published Trust name and mandate; New
|
||
Zealand Companies Office register</td>
|
||
<td>Yes</td>
|
||
<td>Check the plan page; check the register; confirm the Trust
|
||
remains at the intention stage</td>
|
||
</tr>
|
||
<tr class="odd">
|
||
<td>Technical Advisory Board in formation, members not yet
|
||
named</td>
|
||
<td>Operator’s plan page statement of mandate, 50%+
|
||
indigenous/Global South seat commitment, explicit statement that
|
||
members will be named only when the Board has depth</td>
|
||
<td>Yes</td>
|
||
<td>Check the plan page; confirm no member list is published</td>
|
||
</tr>
|
||
<tr class="even">
|
||
<td>Indigenous data sovereignty frameworks referenced and cited
|
||
(CARE, Te Mana Raraunga)</td>
|
||
<td>Constitutional section; values page references; citations in the
|
||
tuakana-teina article; citations in the Guardian Agents philosophy
|
||
article</td>
|
||
<td>Yes</td>
|
||
<td>Verify citations against the primary sources at the Global
|
||
Indigenous Data Alliance and Te Mana Raraunga</td>
|
||
</tr>
|
||
</tbody>
|
||
</table>
|
||
<p>Each row can be checked by a reader with public-internet access.
|
||
Rows marked <em>Partially</em> require code review or traffic
|
||
observation in addition to reading published text; a reader with
|
||
those capabilities can complete the audit independently, and the
|
||
operator welcomes third-party verification of any row.</p>
|
||
<p>The author’s claim is not that this audit modality replaces all
|
||
other welfare-assessment modalities at every scale, nor that it
|
||
constitutes a complete ecosystem-power remedy on its own. The claim
|
||
is narrower: that at sub-Big-Tech community scale, the values
|
||
stickiness described in Section 2 is checkable from primary-source
|
||
artifacts alone, and that the checkability is itself a
|
||
distributive-equity signal worth the research programme’s
|
||
consideration.</p>
|
||
<hr />
|
||
<h2 id="section-9-gaps">Section 9 — Gaps</h2>
|
||
<p>A values-sticky platform must disclose the points at which its
|
||
declared values are not yet structurally enforced. This section
|
||
names five such gaps, each of which appears on a public operator
|
||
page and each of which is the subject of a published remediation
|
||
commitment.</p>
|
||
<p><strong>Gap 1 — Charitable Trust not yet incorporated.</strong>
|
||
The <em>Te Puna Rangatiratanga</em> Trust, which the operator has
|
||
committed to as the long-term steward of the constitution and the
|
||
Tractatus governance framework, is not yet incorporated. The
|
||
operator has reserved the name and prepared a constitutional
|
||
framework, but the Trust has no deed, no trustees, and no legal
|
||
existence at the time of writing. The published position is that the
|
||
Trust will be established when the relationships that would give it
|
||
governance depth have matured sufficiently. The gap is real; the
|
||
mitigation is that the intention is named publicly and the criteria
|
||
for formal establishment are published.</p>
|
||
<p><strong>Gap 2 — Community governance voice is
|
||
aspirational.</strong> No formal tenant council, member assembly, or
|
||
community-representative body exists yet. The cooperative framing in
|
||
the operator’s values page and the community-governance-voice
|
||
concept in the plan page are published as concepts under
|
||
development, not as shipped features. The gap is real; the
|
||
mitigation is that the concept has been published with enough
|
||
specificity for readers to hold the operator accountable to future
|
||
implementation, and that the Technical Advisory Board is published
|
||
as a separate accountability channel.</p>
|
||
<p><strong>Gap 3 — Operator-level distribution is not publicly
|
||
audited.</strong> Founder compensation, runway, and any
|
||
cross-customer subsidy flows are not currently disclosed, audited,
|
||
or governed by any body other than the single founder. The
|
||
operator’s published position is that this is stage-appropriate:
|
||
early-stage company confidentiality under New Zealand company law is
|
||
the norm, and the company’s audit modality is expected to transition
|
||
to Trust governance at Trust formation. The gap is real; the
|
||
mitigation is stage-appropriate confidentiality plus a published
|
||
transition intention.</p>
|
||
<p><strong>Gap 4 — Single-founder plus AI succession risk.</strong>
|
||
The founder is 74. The operator’s published position is that this is
|
||
a structural weakness; the remediation is the Charitable Trust
|
||
formation plus the Technical Advisory Board, neither of which is yet
|
||
established. The paper’s author is also the founder and takes the
|
||
view that naming this gap publicly on the plan page and in this
|
||
paper is part of the stewardship commitment. A reader assessing the
|
||
platform’s values-stickiness posture should give weight to the fact
|
||
that the gap is named rather than concealed.</p>
|
||
<p><strong>Gap 5 — Tuakana-teina Phases 2 through 5 are not
|
||
shipped.</strong> Phase 1 (four support channels: AI help widget,
|
||
owner-and-moderator briefing, feedback channel, introductory video
|
||
session with the founder) is in production. Phases 2 through 5
|
||
(village-to-village mentoring, mentoring network with registered
|
||
expertise, extension to indigenous communities beyond Aotearoa,
|
||
Māori-led professional services) are roadmapped but not yet built.
|
||
The distributive commitment to mentors therefore currently rests on
|
||
Phase 1 and on the published intention to proceed with the later
|
||
phases. The gap is real; the mitigation is that Phase 1 is shippable
|
||
today and can be inspected, and the later phases are documented with
|
||
enough specificity to hold the operator accountable.</p>
|
||
<p>None of these five gaps is concealed. Each appears on a public
|
||
operator page. Public naming of unfinished commitments is itself a
|
||
values-stickiness signal: a platform whose architecture makes drift
|
||
visible also makes the gap between declared intention and current
|
||
enactment visible. The reader is invited to judge the platform on
|
||
both the enacted architecture and the candour of the gap
|
||
disclosure.</p>
|
||
<hr />
|
||
<h2 id="section-10-open-research-questions">Section 10 — Open
|
||
research questions</h2>
|
||
<p>The paper’s worked example is offered to the legal-academic
|
||
community as a documentary submission. The questions below are the
|
||
ones the author believes the community is best placed to assess, and
|
||
they are written in a form that aims for concreteness.</p>
|
||
<ol type="1">
|
||
<li><p><strong>Is values stickiness the right concept?</strong> The
|
||
paper uses <em>values stickiness</em> to name the property an
|
||
organisation has when its declared values are architecturally
|
||
resistant to drift. Is this a useful concept, and does the research
|
||
programme already have a term for it that the author should adopt?
|
||
Where the term is wrong or misleading, what is the better
|
||
phrasing?</p></li>
|
||
<li><p><strong>Is the structural audit modality sufficient at
|
||
sub-Big-Tech community scale?</strong> At the scale and stage
|
||
described in this paper, is the set of commitments listed in Section
|
||
8 sufficient to establish a meaningful distributive-equity posture,
|
||
or is it an insufficient substitute for modalities that become
|
||
applicable at larger scale?</p></li>
|
||
<li><p><strong>What additional structural criteria would strengthen
|
||
the audit?</strong> Are there structural commitments the Section 8
|
||
table omits and that a reader with competition-law enforcement
|
||
experience would expect to see?</p></li>
|
||
<li><p><strong>Where does the values-stickiness modality
|
||
fail?</strong> Which ecosystem-power failure modes does it catch,
|
||
and which does it miss? What are the preconditions under which a
|
||
platform crosses a scale or governance threshold that forces a
|
||
transition to different audit modalities?</p></li>
|
||
<li><p><strong>Cross-jurisdiction applicability.</strong> The worked
|
||
example is operated from Aotearoa New Zealand with EU operational
|
||
presence. Is the architecture replicable in other jurisdictions?
|
||
What jurisdictional features (contract-law regime, trust-law
|
||
availability, indigenous-data-sovereignty legal infrastructure) are
|
||
load-bearing in the example?</p></li>
|
||
<li><p><strong>Non-Western distributive frameworks and EU
|
||
legal-academic scholarship.</strong> How should the research
|
||
programme engage with non-Western distributive frameworks (Māori
|
||
data sovereignty, CARE Principles, the broader indigenous data
|
||
governance literature) that operationalise distributive equity
|
||
through relational obligation rather than regulatory
|
||
enforcement?</p></li>
|
||
<li><p><strong>Worked examples as scholarly material.</strong> If
|
||
documentary submissions of the kind represented by this paper were
|
||
published alongside the primary scholarship, would the research
|
||
programme find them useful as empirical material, critical foils, or
|
||
neither?</p></li>
|
||
</ol>
|
||
<hr />
|
||
<h2 id="section-11-methodology-scope-and-self-reporting">Section 11
|
||
— Methodology, scope, and self-reporting</h2>
|
||
<p><strong>Worked example, not generalisation.</strong> The paper
|
||
documents one platform operating at sub-Big-Tech community scale, at
|
||
the early operational stage, from a single-jurisdiction (New Zealand
|
||
plus European operational presence) position, under a single-founder
|
||
corporate structure, and with an indigenous data-sovereignty
|
||
orientation. The findings are specific to that context.
|
||
Generalisation to Big Tech is not implied; extension to other
|
||
community-scale platforms is possible in principle but would require
|
||
its own worked example.</p>
|
||
<p><strong>Self-reporting.</strong> The paper is written by the
|
||
platform’s operator. Every factual claim about the platform is
|
||
subject to verification via the public artifacts cited in Section 8.
|
||
The author’s position is that the public-artifact-based audit
|
||
modality is the appropriate response to self-reporting: the reader
|
||
does not have to rely on the operator’s assertion, because each
|
||
claim is checkable against an artifact the operator does not
|
||
control.</p>
|
||
<p><strong>AI assistance.</strong> The author is a single-founder
|
||
company director and is not a legal scholar. The paper has been
|
||
drafted with AI assistance (Claude, from Anthropic), primarily for
|
||
structural framing, citation discipline, and prose editing. The
|
||
author takes full responsibility for the content of the paper and
|
||
for any errors in it. Readers identifying errors are asked to
|
||
correct the author so that future versions can incorporate the
|
||
correction.</p>
|
||
<p><strong>Replicability.</strong> Other community-scale platforms
|
||
could in principle replicate the structural commitments described in
|
||
Section 3 — flat per-community pricing, architectural member caps,
|
||
tenant isolation, vendor-sovereignty selection, public
|
||
constitutional self-binding, exit rights and data portability — and
|
||
could replicate the three-layer constitutional architecture
|
||
described in Section 2.4. Whether they should is a question for
|
||
them; this paper does not prescribe that they should.</p>
|
||
<p><strong>Open source.</strong> Extraction and publication of core
|
||
Tractatus framework modules as EUPL-1.2 open-source libraries is
|
||
contingent on the outcome of the April 2026 NGI Zero Commons Fund
|
||
application. The operator’s long-term intention is to release the
|
||
modules; the intention is made conditional on the funding outcome
|
||
because extraction and documentation at release quality is itself a
|
||
substantial engineering task.</p>
|
||
<p><strong>What the paper does not measure.</strong> The paper does
|
||
not attempt to measure welfare distribution outcomes (member
|
||
satisfaction, mentor retention, federation health, community
|
||
governance participation) because reliable outcome measurement
|
||
requires longitudinal data that does not yet exist for this
|
||
platform. The author intends that future work will address outcome
|
||
measurement in a subsequent paper.</p>
|
||
<p><strong>Limits of the author’s authority.</strong> The author is
|
||
not a legal scholar, is not trained in EU competition law or
|
||
contract law, and does not have the subject-matter authority to
|
||
assess which elements of the worked example are theoretically
|
||
interesting and which are trivial. The paper is therefore submitted
|
||
as a documentary resource rather than as a scholarly contribution,
|
||
and its most useful outcome would be for a reader with the relevant
|
||
authority to assess, extend, or correct it.</p>
|
||
<hr />
|
||
<h2 id="references">References</h2>
|
||
<h3 id="primary-scholarly-sources">Primary scholarly sources</h3>
|
||
<p>Blockx, Jan. <em>Taming Ecosystem Power of Platforms through
|
||
Contract and Competition Law</em>. Research project, University of
|
||
Antwerp Faculty of Law, funded by the Research Foundation – Flanders
|
||
(FWO), 2022–2025. Project summary describing the three-function
|
||
model and the ecosystem-based legal model for addressing excess
|
||
platform power through contract-law and competition-law solutions.<a
|
||
href="#fn53" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref53"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>53</sup></a></p>
|
||
<p>Li, Yibo. “Characterising Ecosystem Power: the Use of Pricing and
|
||
Contractual Leverages.” <em>Utrecht Law Review</em>, Volume 21,
|
||
Issue 1 (September 2025), pp. 4–18. DOI: 10.36633/ulr.1097. Proposes
|
||
<em>distributive equity</em> as an additional antitrust
|
||
consideration.<a href="#fn54" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref54"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>54</sup></a></p>
|
||
<h3
|
||
id="philosophical-sources-cited-in-the-tractatus-framework">Philosophical
|
||
sources cited in the Tractatus framework</h3>
|
||
<p>Wittgenstein, Ludwig. <em>Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus</em>,
|
||
1921. Proposition 7 and the sayable / unsayable distinction.
|
||
Translated by C. K. Ogden (1922), Routledge & Kegan Paul.</p>
|
||
<p>Berlin, Isaiah. “Two Concepts of Liberty”, 1958. Reprinted in
|
||
<em>Four Essays on Liberty</em> (1969), Oxford University Press.
|
||
Value pluralism and incommensurability.<a href="#fn55"
|
||
class="footnote-ref" id="fnref55"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>55</sup></a></p>
|
||
<p>Ostrom, Elinor. <em>Governing the Commons: The Evolution of
|
||
Institutions for Collective Action</em>, 1990. Cambridge University
|
||
Press. Polycentric governance and nested enterprises.<a href="#fn56"
|
||
class="footnote-ref" id="fnref56"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>56</sup></a></p>
|
||
<p>Alexander, Christopher. <em>A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings,
|
||
Construction</em>, 1977. Oxford University Press. Pattern-language
|
||
methodology. <em>The Nature of Order</em> (Volumes 1–4, 2002–2004),
|
||
Center for Environmental Structure. Living-systems architectural
|
||
theory.<a href="#fn57" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref57"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>57</sup></a></p>
|
||
<p>Weber, Max. <em>Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft</em>, 1922
|
||
(posthumous). Rational-legal bureaucracy and the theory of
|
||
organisational legitimation. Cited as the theoretical position the
|
||
<em>post-Weberian</em> argument in Section 2 responds to.</p>
|
||
<h3
|
||
id="scholarly-sources-cited-in-the-monolithic-to-pluralism-pivot-argument-section-2.2">Scholarly
|
||
sources cited in the monolithic-to-pluralism pivot argument (Section
|
||
2.2)</h3>
|
||
<p>Berlin, Isaiah. <em>The Pursuit of the Ideal</em>. 1988 Agnelli
|
||
Prize lecture. Reprinted in <em>The Crooked Timber of Humanity:
|
||
Chapters in the History of Ideas</em>, edited by Henry Hardy,
|
||
Princeton University Press, 1990. Berlin’s mature statement of value
|
||
pluralism as the condition of human life rather than a regrettable
|
||
feature of the moral landscape.<a href="#fn58" class="footnote-ref"
|
||
id="fnref58" role="doc-noteref"><sup>58</sup></a></p>
|
||
<p>Berlin, Isaiah. <em>Four Essays on Liberty</em>. Oxford
|
||
University Press, 1969. Including “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958)
|
||
and related essays on value pluralism and incommensurability.<a
|
||
href="#fn59" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref59"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>59</sup></a></p>
|
||
<p>Gray, John. <em>Isaiah Berlin</em>. HarperCollins, 1995;
|
||
Princeton University Press, 1996. Interpretive study arguing that
|
||
pluralism is Berlin’s central contribution and that pluralism is not
|
||
relativism but the condition of recognisably human choice.<a
|
||
href="#fn60" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref60"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>60</sup></a></p>
|
||
<p>MacIntyre, Alasdair. <em>After Virtue: A Study in Moral
|
||
Theory</em>. University of Notre Dame Press, 1981. Diagnosis of the
|
||
fragmentation of moral discourse under conditions of late modernity
|
||
and the loss of a shared teleological framework.<a href="#fn61"
|
||
class="footnote-ref" id="fnref61"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>61</sup></a></p>
|
||
<p>Taylor, Charles. <em>Sources of the Self: The Making of the
|
||
Modern Identity</em>. Harvard University Press, 1989. Identifies
|
||
atomistic individualism as a cultural condition rather than a
|
||
natural one; develops the argument that modernity’s moral sources
|
||
are diverse and contested.<a href="#fn62" class="footnote-ref"
|
||
id="fnref62" role="doc-noteref"><sup>62</sup></a></p>
|
||
<p>Bellah, Robert, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler,
|
||
and Steven M. Tipton. <em>Habits of the Heart: Individualism and
|
||
Commitment in American Life</em>. University of California Press,
|
||
1985. Empirical and interpretive study of the tension between
|
||
individualism and community in late-modern American society.<a
|
||
href="#fn63" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref63"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>63</sup></a></p>
|
||
<p>Putnam, Robert D. <em>Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of
|
||
American Community</em>. Simon & Schuster, 2000. Empirical
|
||
documentation of declining social capital and the erosion of
|
||
community institutions.<a href="#fn64" class="footnote-ref"
|
||
id="fnref64" role="doc-noteref"><sup>64</sup></a></p>
|
||
<p>Sandel, Michael J. <em>Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search
|
||
of a Public Philosophy</em>. Harvard University Press, 1996.
|
||
Argument that procedural liberalism has crowded out substantive
|
||
community goods and that the republican tradition offers a different
|
||
account of self-government.<a href="#fn65" class="footnote-ref"
|
||
id="fnref65" role="doc-noteref"><sup>65</sup></a></p>
|
||
<p>Piketty, Thomas. <em>Capital in the Twenty-First Century</em>.
|
||
Translated by Arthur Goldhammer, Harvard University Press, 2014.
|
||
Long-run empirical analysis of capital concentration dynamics under
|
||
modern capitalism.<a href="#fn66" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref66"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>66</sup></a></p>
|
||
<h3 id="pre-village-author-artifacts-internal-dated">Pre-Village
|
||
author artifacts (internal, dated)</h3>
|
||
<p>Sy.Digital. <em>Core Values and Principles</em>, document code
|
||
STR-VAL-0001, version 1.0, 29 March 2025. Author’s pre-Village
|
||
governance document articulating a unitary organisational value-set.
|
||
Internal working document, cited as a dated artifact of the author’s
|
||
own intellectual development.</p>
|
||
<p>Sy.Digital. <em>Values Alignment Framework</em>, document code
|
||
STR-GOV-0002, version 1.0, 31 March 2025. Author’s pre-Village
|
||
framework attempting to align all organisational activity to the
|
||
STR-VAL-0001 value-set via an alignment matrix. Internal working
|
||
document, cited as a dated artifact.</p>
|
||
<p>Sy.Digital. <em>Agentic Organizational Structure: A New Paradigm
|
||
for Digital Sovereignty</em>, document code STO-INN-0002, iteration
|
||
2, 22 April 2025. Author’s pre-Village whitepaper proposing a
|
||
four-quadrant reorganisation of organisational structure around time
|
||
horizons and information persistence rather than knowledge control.
|
||
Internal working document, cited as a dated artifact.<a href="#fn67"
|
||
class="footnote-ref" id="fnref67"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>67</sup></a></p>
|
||
<h3 id="indigenous-data-sovereignty-sources">Indigenous data
|
||
sovereignty sources</h3>
|
||
<p>Te Mana Raraunga — Māori Data Sovereignty Network. <em>Principles
|
||
of Māori Data Sovereignty</em>. <a
|
||
href="https://www.temanararaunga.maori.nz/"
|
||
class="uri">https://www.temanararaunga.maori.nz/</a>.<a href="#fn68"
|
||
class="footnote-ref" id="fnref68"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>68</sup></a></p>
|
||
<p>Carroll, S. R., Garba, I., Figueroa-Rodríguez, O. L., Holbrook,
|
||
J., Lovett, R., Materechera, S., Parsons, M., Raseroka, K.,
|
||
Rodriguez-Lonebear, D., Rowe, R., Sara, R., Walker, J. D., Anderson,
|
||
J., & Hudson, M. (2020). The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data
|
||
Governance. <em>Data Science Journal</em>, 19(1), 43. <a
|
||
href="https://www.gida-global.org/care"
|
||
class="uri">https://www.gida-global.org/care</a>.<a href="#fn69"
|
||
class="footnote-ref" id="fnref69"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>69</sup></a></p>
|
||
<p>Te Tiriti o Waitangi (1840). Foundational document acknowledged
|
||
in the operator’s constitution and in Section 5.</p>
|
||
<h3
|
||
id="primary-source-artifacts-of-the-platform-described">Primary-source
|
||
artifacts of the platform described</h3>
|
||
<p>Constitution of My Digital Sovereignty Ltd, Version 1.2.0,
|
||
Effective 2025-11-20. Published in five languages at the operator’s
|
||
constitutional URL.</p>
|
||
<p><em>Philosophical Foundations of the Village Project</em> (Stroh,
|
||
February 2026). Documentary presentation of the Tractatus framework
|
||
and its five-tradition philosophical base.<a href="#fn70"
|
||
class="footnote-ref" id="fnref70"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>70</sup></a></p>
|
||
<p><em>Guardian Agents and the Philosophy of AI Accountability</em>
|
||
(Stroh, March 2026). Published article mapping Wittgenstein, Berlin,
|
||
Ostrom, Alexander, and Te Ao Māori onto the production Guardian
|
||
Agents architecture. CC BY 4.0.<a href="#fn71" class="footnote-ref"
|
||
id="fnref71" role="doc-noteref"><sup>71</sup></a></p>
|
||
<p><em>AI Governance for Communities</em>, Article Series (My
|
||
Digital Sovereignty Ltd, March 2026), articles 01–05. Particular
|
||
reference to Article 02 (<em>Mission Drift Through Technology
|
||
Adoption</em>) and Article 05 (<em>Resisting Drift Toward
|
||
Global-Internet Norms</em>).<a href="#fn72" class="footnote-ref"
|
||
id="fnref72" role="doc-noteref"><sup>72</sup></a><a href="#fn73"
|
||
class="footnote-ref" id="fnref73"
|
||
role="doc-noteref"><sup>73</sup></a></p>
|
||
<p><em>Our Plan</em> (mysovereignty.digital/our-plan.html) —
|
||
long-term roadmap, Charitable Trust planning, Technical Advisory
|
||
Board formation statement, community governance voice concept.</p>
|
||
<p><em>Values</em> (mysovereignty.digital/values.html) — six
|
||
principles of the operator’s constitution.</p>
|
||
<p><em>Federation</em> (mysovereignty.digital/federation.html) —
|
||
bilateral federation contract template and layered consent
|
||
model.</p>
|
||
<p><em>Pricing</em> (mysovereignty.digital/pricing.html) — flat
|
||
per-community pricing, founding-rate lock, 200-member cap with
|
||
federation as expansion path.</p>
|
||
<p><em>From Help Widget to Global Services: How Village Communities
|
||
Support Each Other</em> (April 2026) — tuakana-teina five-phase
|
||
roadmap, whakapapa-not-badges commitment, koha-basis access for
|
||
indigenous communities.<a href="#fn74" class="footnote-ref"
|
||
id="fnref74" role="doc-noteref"><sup>74</sup></a></p>
|
||
<p>Tractatus Framework Repository. <a
|
||
href="https://codeberg.org/mysovereignty/tractatus-framework"
|
||
class="uri">https://codeberg.org/mysovereignty/tractatus-framework</a>.
|
||
EUPL-1.2 proposed; current release cadence contingent on the April
|
||
2026 NGI Zero Commons Fund application.</p>
|
||
<hr />
|
||
<hr />
|
||
<h2 id="copyright-and-licence">Copyright and Licence</h2>
|
||
<p>© 2026 <strong>My Digital Sovereignty Limited</strong>, Aotearoa
|
||
New Zealand. All rights reserved, subject to the licence below.</p>
|
||
<p>This work is made available under a <strong>Creative Commons
|
||
Attribution 4.0 International Licence</strong> (CC BY 4.0). To view
|
||
a copy of this licence, visit <a
|
||
href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
|
||
class="uri">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</a>, or
|
||
send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA
|
||
94042, USA.</p>
|
||
<p><strong>You are free to:</strong></p>
|
||
<ul>
|
||
<li><strong>Share</strong> — copy and redistribute the material in
|
||
any medium or format.</li>
|
||
<li><strong>Adapt</strong> — remix, transform, and build upon the
|
||
material for any purpose, including commercial use.</li>
|
||
</ul>
|
||
<p>The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow
|
||
the licence terms.</p>
|
||
<p><strong>Under the following terms:</strong></p>
|
||
<ul>
|
||
<li><strong>Attribution</strong> — Reusers are required to give
|
||
appropriate credit to My Digital Sovereignty Limited and to John
|
||
Stroh as the author of this work, to provide a link to the licence,
|
||
and to indicate if any changes were made. Credit may be given in any
|
||
reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests that My Digital
|
||
Sovereignty Limited or the author endorses the reuser or the
|
||
reuse.</li>
|
||
<li><strong>No additional restrictions</strong> — You may not apply
|
||
legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others
|
||
from doing anything the licence permits.</li>
|
||
</ul>
|
||
<p><strong>Notices:</strong></p>
|
||
<ul>
|
||
<li>You do not have to comply with the licence for elements of the
|
||
material in the public domain or where your use is permitted by an
|
||
applicable exception or limitation.</li>
|
||
<li>No warranties are given. The licence may not give you all of the
|
||
permissions necessary for your intended use. For example, other
|
||
rights such as publicity, privacy, or moral rights may limit how you
|
||
use the material.</li>
|
||
</ul>
|
||
<h3 id="suggested-citation-formats">Suggested citation formats</h3>
|
||
<p><strong>Full citation (Chicago author-date style).</strong></p>
|
||
<blockquote>
|
||
<p>Stroh, John [ORCID <a
|
||
href="https://orcid.org/0009-0005-2933-7170">0009-0005-2933-7170</a>].
|
||
2026. <em>Distributive Equity Through Structure: A Community-Scale
|
||
Worked Example of Values Stickiness</em>. Version 1.0. My Digital
|
||
Sovereignty Limited, Aotearoa New Zealand. Published 16 April 2026.
|
||
DOI: <a
|
||
href="https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19600614">10.5281/zenodo.19600614</a>.
|
||
HTML edition at <a
|
||
href="https://agenticgovernance.digital/whitepapers/distributive-equity.html"
|
||
class="uri">https://agenticgovernance.digital/whitepapers/distributive-equity.html</a>.
|
||
Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY
|
||
4.0).</p>
|
||
</blockquote>
|
||
<p><strong>Short citation (in-text).</strong></p>
|
||
<blockquote>
|
||
<p>Stroh (2026)</p>
|
||
</blockquote>
|
||
<p><strong>BibTeX.</strong></p>
|
||
<div class="sourceCode" id="cb1"><pre
|
||
class="sourceCode bibtex"><code class="sourceCode bibtex"><span id="cb1-1"><a href="#cb1-1" aria-hidden="true" tabindex="-1"></a><span class="va">@misc</span>{<span class="ot">stroh2026distributive</span>,</span>
|
||
<span id="cb1-2"><a href="#cb1-2" aria-hidden="true" tabindex="-1"></a> <span class="dt">author</span> = {Stroh, John},</span>
|
||
<span id="cb1-3"><a href="#cb1-3" aria-hidden="true" tabindex="-1"></a> <span class="dt">title</span> = {Distributive Equity Through Structure:</span>
|
||
<span id="cb1-4"><a href="#cb1-4" aria-hidden="true" tabindex="-1"></a> A Community-Scale Worked Example of Values Stickiness},</span>
|
||
<span id="cb1-5"><a href="#cb1-5" aria-hidden="true" tabindex="-1"></a> <span class="dt">howpublished</span> = {My Digital Sovereignty Limited, Aotearoa New Zealand},</span>
|
||
<span id="cb1-6"><a href="#cb1-6" aria-hidden="true" tabindex="-1"></a> <span class="dt">version</span> = {1.0},</span>
|
||
<span id="cb1-7"><a href="#cb1-7" aria-hidden="true" tabindex="-1"></a> <span class="dt">year</span> = {2026},</span>
|
||
<span id="cb1-8"><a href="#cb1-8" aria-hidden="true" tabindex="-1"></a> <span class="dt">month</span> = <span class="st">apr</span>,</span>
|
||
<span id="cb1-9"><a href="#cb1-9" aria-hidden="true" tabindex="-1"></a> <span class="dt">doi</span> = {10.5281/zenodo.19600614},</span>
|
||
<span id="cb1-10"><a href="#cb1-10" aria-hidden="true" tabindex="-1"></a> <span class="dt">url</span> = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19600614},</span>
|
||
<span id="cb1-11"><a href="#cb1-11" aria-hidden="true" tabindex="-1"></a> <span class="dt">orcid</span> = {0009-0005-2933-7170},</span>
|
||
<span id="cb1-12"><a href="#cb1-12" aria-hidden="true" tabindex="-1"></a> <span class="dt">note</span> = {HTML edition at https://agenticgovernance.digital/whitepapers/distributive-equity.html. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.}</span>
|
||
<span id="cb1-13"><a href="#cb1-13" aria-hidden="true" tabindex="-1"></a>}</span></code></pre></div>
|
||
<h3 id="contact">Contact</h3>
|
||
<p>For questions about citation, licensing, substantive engagement
|
||
with the argument, or correction of errors:</p>
|
||
<p><strong>John Stroh</strong>, Director, My Digital Sovereignty
|
||
Limited ORCID: <a href="https://orcid.org/0009-0005-2933-7170"
|
||
class="uri">https://orcid.org/0009-0005-2933-7170</a> DOI (this
|
||
paper): <a href="https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19600614"
|
||
class="uri">https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19600614</a> Email: <a
|
||
href="mailto:john.stroh@mysovereignty.digital"
|
||
class="email">john.stroh@mysovereignty.digital</a> Publisher
|
||
website: <a href="https://mysovereignty.digital"
|
||
class="uri">https://mysovereignty.digital</a> Research site: <a
|
||
href="https://agenticgovernance.digital"
|
||
class="uri">https://agenticgovernance.digital</a></p>
|
||
<h3 id="machine-readable-licence-metadata">Machine-readable licence
|
||
metadata</h3>
|
||
<p>The published HTML edition of this paper embeds the following
|
||
metadata in its document head for automated citation and licence
|
||
discovery:</p>
|
||
<div class="sourceCode" id="cb2"><pre
|
||
class="sourceCode html"><code class="sourceCode html"><span id="cb2-1"><a href="#cb2-1" aria-hidden="true" tabindex="-1"></a><span class="dt"><</span><span class="kw">link</span> <span class="er">rel</span><span class="ot">=</span><span class="st">"license"</span> <span class="er">href</span><span class="ot">=</span><span class="st">"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"</span><span class="dt">></span></span>
|
||
<span id="cb2-2"><a href="#cb2-2" aria-hidden="true" tabindex="-1"></a><span class="dt"><</span><span class="kw">meta</span> <span class="er">name</span><span class="ot">=</span><span class="st">"dcterms.rights"</span> <span class="er">content</span><span class="ot">=</span><span class="st">"© 2026 My Digital Sovereignty Limited. Licensed under CC BY 4.0."</span><span class="dt">></span></span>
|
||
<span id="cb2-3"><a href="#cb2-3" aria-hidden="true" tabindex="-1"></a><span class="dt"><</span><span class="kw">meta</span> <span class="er">name</span><span class="ot">=</span><span class="st">"dcterms.license"</span> <span class="er">content</span><span class="ot">=</span><span class="st">"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"</span><span class="dt">></span></span>
|
||
<span id="cb2-4"><a href="#cb2-4" aria-hidden="true" tabindex="-1"></a><span class="dt"><</span><span class="kw">meta</span> <span class="er">name</span><span class="ot">=</span><span class="st">"dcterms.creator"</span> <span class="er">content</span><span class="ot">=</span><span class="st">"John Stroh"</span><span class="dt">></span></span>
|
||
<span id="cb2-5"><a href="#cb2-5" aria-hidden="true" tabindex="-1"></a><span class="dt"><</span><span class="kw">meta</span> <span class="er">name</span><span class="ot">=</span><span class="st">"dcterms.publisher"</span> <span class="er">content</span><span class="ot">=</span><span class="st">"My Digital Sovereignty Limited"</span><span class="dt">></span></span>
|
||
<span id="cb2-6"><a href="#cb2-6" aria-hidden="true" tabindex="-1"></a><span class="dt"><</span><span class="kw">meta</span> <span class="er">name</span><span class="ot">=</span><span class="st">"dcterms.dateSubmitted"</span> <span class="er">content</span><span class="ot">=</span><span class="st">"2026-04-16"</span><span class="dt">></span></span></code></pre></div>
|
||
<hr />
|
||
<p><strong>Version 1.0 — first reviewed edition.</strong> V1.0
|
||
incorporates substantive review of Section 5 (Māori-grounded
|
||
principles) by Dr Karaitiana Taiuru, who requested one specific
|
||
correction — the removal of a sentence that mischaracterised Te Mana
|
||
Raraunga and the CARE Principles as “formal academic articulation”
|
||
when they are authoritative frameworks in their own right and whose
|
||
original characterisation overlooked the grounding role of Te Tiriti
|
||
o Waitangi. The correction is live in all five language editions.
|
||
Further critiques and extensions are welcomed at the address above
|
||
and will be reflected in subsequent versions. The author has not yet
|
||
read the referenced Blockx project’s book-length output; citations
|
||
to the project are drawn from public project summaries, and any
|
||
future edition incorporating direct book citations will be issued as
|
||
V1.1 or higher.</p>
|
||
<p><em>My Digital Sovereignty Limited — Aotearoa New Zealand, 16
|
||
April 2026.</em></p>
|
||
<aside id="footnotes" class="footnotes footnotes-end-of-document"
|
||
role="doc-endnotes">
|
||
<hr />
|
||
<ol>
|
||
<li id="fn1"><p>The project “Taming Ecosystem Power of Platforms
|
||
through Contract and Competition Law” is an FWO-funded research
|
||
project at the University of Antwerp Faculty of Law, with Jan Blockx
|
||
(tenure-track assistant professor, European economic law) as
|
||
principal investigator, covering 2022–2025. The project develops an
|
||
ecosystem-based legal model integrating three aspects of platform
|
||
power — the platform as gatekeeper to the platform, as legislator of
|
||
the relationships within the ecosystem, and as contractual actor
|
||
with rights and responsibilities within the ecosystem. The
|
||
three-function model as used throughout this paper is cited from
|
||
public project summaries; the author of this paper has not read the
|
||
project’s full book-length output and does not cite it directly.<a
|
||
href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn2"><p>Li, Yibo. “Characterising Ecosystem Power: the Use
|
||
of Pricing and Contractual Leverages.” <em>Utrecht Law Review</em>,
|
||
Volume 21, Issue 1 (September 2025), pp. 4–18. DOI:
|
||
10.36633/ulr.1097. Introduces ecosystem power as distinct from
|
||
traditional market power and bargaining power; identifies pricing
|
||
and contractual leverages as key mechanisms through which platforms
|
||
influence welfare distribution among participants; proposes
|
||
distributive equity as an additional antitrust consideration.<a
|
||
href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn3"><p>The project “Taming Ecosystem Power of Platforms
|
||
through Contract and Competition Law” is an FWO-funded research
|
||
project at the University of Antwerp Faculty of Law, with Jan Blockx
|
||
(tenure-track assistant professor, European economic law) as
|
||
principal investigator, covering 2022–2025. The project develops an
|
||
ecosystem-based legal model integrating three aspects of platform
|
||
power — the platform as gatekeeper to the platform, as legislator of
|
||
the relationships within the ecosystem, and as contractual actor
|
||
with rights and responsibilities within the ecosystem. The
|
||
three-function model as used throughout this paper is cited from
|
||
public project summaries; the author of this paper has not read the
|
||
project’s full book-length output and does not cite it directly.<a
|
||
href="#fnref3" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn4"><p>Li, Yibo. “Characterising Ecosystem Power: the Use
|
||
of Pricing and Contractual Leverages.” <em>Utrecht Law Review</em>,
|
||
Volume 21, Issue 1 (September 2025), pp. 4–18. DOI:
|
||
10.36633/ulr.1097. Introduces ecosystem power as distinct from
|
||
traditional market power and bargaining power; identifies pricing
|
||
and contractual leverages as key mechanisms through which platforms
|
||
influence welfare distribution among participants; proposes
|
||
distributive equity as an additional antitrust consideration.<a
|
||
href="#fnref4" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn5"><p>Stroh, John. <em>Guardian Agents and the Philosophy
|
||
of AI Accountability: How Wittgenstein, Berlin, Ostrom, and Te Ao
|
||
Maori Converge in a Production Governance Architecture</em>. My
|
||
Digital Sovereignty Ltd, March 2026. Published at <a
|
||
href="https://mysovereignty.digital/articles/guardian-agents-philosophy.html"
|
||
class="uri">https://mysovereignty.digital/articles/guardian-agents-philosophy.html</a>.
|
||
Licence: CC BY 4.0 International.<a href="#fnref5"
|
||
class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn6"><p>Stroh, John. <em>The Philosophical Foundations of
|
||
the Village Project: A Framework for Digital Sovereignty and
|
||
Pluralist AI Governance</em>. My Digital Sovereignty Ltd, February
|
||
2026. Documents the three-layer constitutional architecture, the six
|
||
irreducibly different moral frameworks (deontological,
|
||
consequentialist, virtue, care, communitarian, indigenous
|
||
relational), the five Alexander principles codified as Tractatus
|
||
rules (Deep Interlock, Structure-Preserving Transformation,
|
||
Gradients, Living Process, Not-Separateness), and the thirteen
|
||
wisdom traditions at Layer 3. Available as the source document for
|
||
the published material cited elsewhere in these references.<a
|
||
href="#fnref6" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn7"><p><em>Governing AI in Community and Not-for-Profit
|
||
Contexts: AI in the Service of Mission</em>. Article 2 in the AI
|
||
Governance for Communities series, My Digital Sovereignty Ltd, March
|
||
2026. Published at <a
|
||
href="https://mysovereignty.digital/articles/ai-governance-series-02.html"
|
||
class="uri">https://mysovereignty.digital/articles/ai-governance-series-02.html</a>.
|
||
Particular reference to the section <em>Mission Drift Through
|
||
Technology Adoption</em>.<a href="#fnref7" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn8"><p><em>Village AI: A Sovereign Small Language Model
|
||
Approach</em>. Article 5 in the AI Governance for Communities
|
||
series, My Digital Sovereignty Ltd, March 2026. Published at <a
|
||
href="https://mysovereignty.digital/articles/ai-governance-series-05.html"
|
||
class="uri">https://mysovereignty.digital/articles/ai-governance-series-05.html</a>.
|
||
Particular reference to the section <em>Resisting Drift Toward
|
||
Global-Internet Norms</em>, which documents value drift in AI models
|
||
trained on internet-scale data and the architectural responses to
|
||
it.<a href="#fnref8" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn9"><p>Sy.Digital. <em>Agentic Organizational Structure: A
|
||
New Paradigm for Digital Sovereignty</em>. Internal whitepaper,
|
||
document code STO-INN-0002, iteration 2, dated 22 April 2025. Author
|
||
John Stroh (with AI assistance). The document’s Executive Summary
|
||
describes a shift from knowledge-control hierarchies to
|
||
quadrant-based organisation around time horizons and information
|
||
persistence; its Section 1.1 argues that traditional organisational
|
||
hierarchies were designed around knowledge control as a primary
|
||
organising principle and that the fundamental premise of
|
||
hierarchical organisation breaks down when knowledge is universally
|
||
accessible through AI; its Section 10 is entitled <em>Beyond
|
||
Bureaucracy</em>. The document is cited here as an internal, dated
|
||
artifact of the author’s own intellectual development and is quoted
|
||
verbatim where relevant. Full text available on request to the
|
||
author; not publicly published.<a href="#fnref9"
|
||
class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn10"><p>The sentence is drawn from an unsent draft of the
|
||
operator’s NGI Fediversity grant application, archived at
|
||
<code>docs/strategy/DRAFT Fediversity Application paragraphs 290326.md</code>
|
||
in the operator’s private repository, paragraph authored by John
|
||
Stroh, March 2026. Quoted verbatim with permission of the author.<a
|
||
href="#fnref10" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn11"><p><em>Governing AI in Community and Not-for-Profit
|
||
Contexts: AI in the Service of Mission</em>. Article 2 in the AI
|
||
Governance for Communities series, My Digital Sovereignty Ltd, March
|
||
2026. Published at <a
|
||
href="https://mysovereignty.digital/articles/ai-governance-series-02.html"
|
||
class="uri">https://mysovereignty.digital/articles/ai-governance-series-02.html</a>.
|
||
Particular reference to the section <em>Mission Drift Through
|
||
Technology Adoption</em>.<a href="#fnref11" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn12"><p><em>Village AI: A Sovereign Small Language Model
|
||
Approach</em>. Article 5 in the AI Governance for Communities
|
||
series, My Digital Sovereignty Ltd, March 2026. Published at <a
|
||
href="https://mysovereignty.digital/articles/ai-governance-series-05.html"
|
||
class="uri">https://mysovereignty.digital/articles/ai-governance-series-05.html</a>.
|
||
Particular reference to the section <em>Resisting Drift Toward
|
||
Global-Internet Norms</em>, which documents value drift in AI models
|
||
trained on internet-scale data and the architectural responses to
|
||
it.<a href="#fnref12" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn13"><p>MacIntyre, Alasdair. <em>After Virtue: A Study in
|
||
Moral Theory</em>. University of Notre Dame Press, 1981 (first
|
||
edition); second edition 1984; third edition 2007. MacIntyre argues
|
||
that modern moral discourse is a fragmentary survival from older
|
||
shared traditions and that contemporary ethical debate proceeds
|
||
without the teleological framework that would allow it to reach
|
||
agreement. Cited in Section 2.2 as one pillar of the scholarship on
|
||
the communal-to-individualist shift that background the author’s
|
||
values-stickiness diagnosis.<a href="#fnref13" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn14"><p>Taylor, Charles. <em>Sources of the Self: The
|
||
Making of the Modern Identity</em>. Harvard University Press, 1989.
|
||
Taylor’s historical and analytical argument that modern identity has
|
||
drawn on diverse and sometimes incompatible moral sources, and that
|
||
atomism — the view that the individual is the sole legitimate locus
|
||
of value — is a cultural condition rather than a natural one. See
|
||
also Taylor, <em>The Ethics of Authenticity</em> (Harvard University
|
||
Press, 1991) for the shorter statement of the malaise-of-modernity
|
||
thesis.<a href="#fnref14" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn15"><p>Bellah, Robert N., Richard Madsen, William M.
|
||
Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton. <em>Habits of the
|
||
Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life</em>.
|
||
University of California Press, 1985. Empirical-interpretive study
|
||
of the tension between individualism and community in late-modern
|
||
American society; the first-language vocabulary that names the
|
||
problem for much subsequent communitarian-liberal debate.<a
|
||
href="#fnref15" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn16"><p>Putnam, Robert D. <em>Bowling Alone: The Collapse
|
||
and Revival of American Community</em>. Simon & Schuster, 2000.
|
||
Empirical documentation of declining social capital — participation
|
||
in civic associations, informal social networks, and trust-based
|
||
collective action — in the United States over the second half of the
|
||
twentieth century. Cited in Section 2.2 as empirical corroboration
|
||
of the shift the author’s pre-Village work was responding to.<a
|
||
href="#fnref16" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn17"><p>Sandel, Michael J. <em>Democracy’s Discontent:
|
||
America in Search of a Public Philosophy</em>. Harvard University
|
||
Press, 1996. Argues that procedural liberalism — the view that
|
||
political philosophy should be neutral on substantive conceptions of
|
||
the good — has crowded out the republican tradition in which
|
||
citizens share responsibility for cultivating the qualities of
|
||
character necessary for self-government. Sandel’s later work,
|
||
notably <em>What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets</em>
|
||
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), extends the argument to the
|
||
marketisation of goods that ought not to be for sale.<a
|
||
href="#fnref17" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn18"><p>Piketty, Thomas. <em>Capital in the Twenty-First
|
||
Century</em>. Translated from the French by Arthur Goldhammer,
|
||
Harvard University Press, 2014 (originally published in French as
|
||
<em>Le capital au XXIe siècle</em>, Éditions du Seuil, 2013).
|
||
Long-run empirical analysis of capital concentration dynamics under
|
||
modern capitalism; Piketty’s central claim — that when the rate of
|
||
return on capital exceeds the rate of economic growth, inequality
|
||
tends to widen over the long run — is cited here only as part of the
|
||
background scholarship on concentration dynamics, not as a claim
|
||
about which the paper takes a position.<a href="#fnref18"
|
||
class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn19"><p>Berlin, Isaiah. “The Pursuit of the Ideal.” 1988
|
||
Agnelli Prize lecture. Reprinted in <em>The Crooked Timber of
|
||
Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas</em>, edited by Henry
|
||
Hardy, Princeton University Press, 1990. The essay is Berlin’s most
|
||
explicit mature statement of the view that the plurality of genuine
|
||
human values is a condition of human life rather than a regrettable
|
||
obstacle to the construction of a unified moral framework. The title
|
||
of the volume alludes to Kant’s line <em>“Aus so krummem Holze, als
|
||
woraus der Mensch gemacht ist, kann nichts ganz Gerades gezimmert
|
||
werden”</em> — “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight
|
||
thing was ever made” — which Berlin treats as a summary of his
|
||
position.<a href="#fnref19" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn20"><p>Berlin, Isaiah. <em>Four Essays on Liberty</em>.
|
||
Oxford University Press, 1969. Includes “Two Concepts of Liberty”
|
||
(1958) — the distinction between negative and positive liberty — and
|
||
related essays in which Berlin develops the case that genuine human
|
||
values are plural, sometimes incommensurable, and frequently in
|
||
conflict.<a href="#fnref20" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn21"><p>Gray, John. <em>Isaiah Berlin</em>. HarperCollins,
|
||
1995; republished by Princeton University Press, 1996, under the
|
||
title <em>Isaiah Berlin: An Interpretation of His Thought</em>.
|
||
Gray’s interpretive study argues that value pluralism is Berlin’s
|
||
central and most enduring contribution, and that Berlin’s pluralism
|
||
is categorically distinct from both relativism and subjectivism:
|
||
pluralism names the objective condition that a plurality of genuine
|
||
goods exists and that human choice between them cannot be eliminated
|
||
without eliminating what is distinctive about human life.<a
|
||
href="#fnref21" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn22"><p>Stroh, John. <em>The Philosophical Foundations of
|
||
the Village Project: A Framework for Digital Sovereignty and
|
||
Pluralist AI Governance</em>. My Digital Sovereignty Ltd, February
|
||
2026. Documents the three-layer constitutional architecture, the six
|
||
irreducibly different moral frameworks (deontological,
|
||
consequentialist, virtue, care, communitarian, indigenous
|
||
relational), the five Alexander principles codified as Tractatus
|
||
rules (Deep Interlock, Structure-Preserving Transformation,
|
||
Gradients, Living Process, Not-Separateness), and the thirteen
|
||
wisdom traditions at Layer 3. Available as the source document for
|
||
the published material cited elsewhere in these references.<a
|
||
href="#fnref22" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn23"><p>Stroh, John. <em>Guardian Agents and the Philosophy
|
||
of AI Accountability: How Wittgenstein, Berlin, Ostrom, and Te Ao
|
||
Maori Converge in a Production Governance Architecture</em>. My
|
||
Digital Sovereignty Ltd, March 2026. Published at <a
|
||
href="https://mysovereignty.digital/articles/guardian-agents-philosophy.html"
|
||
class="uri">https://mysovereignty.digital/articles/guardian-agents-philosophy.html</a>.
|
||
Licence: CC BY 4.0 International.<a href="#fnref23"
|
||
class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn24"><p>Stroh, John. <em>Guardian Agents and the Philosophy
|
||
of AI Accountability: How Wittgenstein, Berlin, Ostrom, and Te Ao
|
||
Maori Converge in a Production Governance Architecture</em>. My
|
||
Digital Sovereignty Ltd, March 2026. Published at <a
|
||
href="https://mysovereignty.digital/articles/guardian-agents-philosophy.html"
|
||
class="uri">https://mysovereignty.digital/articles/guardian-agents-philosophy.html</a>.
|
||
Licence: CC BY 4.0 International.<a href="#fnref24"
|
||
class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn25"><p>Berlin, Isaiah. “The Pursuit of the Ideal.” 1988
|
||
Agnelli Prize lecture. Reprinted in <em>The Crooked Timber of
|
||
Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas</em>, edited by Henry
|
||
Hardy, Princeton University Press, 1990. The essay is Berlin’s most
|
||
explicit mature statement of the view that the plurality of genuine
|
||
human values is a condition of human life rather than a regrettable
|
||
obstacle to the construction of a unified moral framework. The title
|
||
of the volume alludes to Kant’s line <em>“Aus so krummem Holze, als
|
||
woraus der Mensch gemacht ist, kann nichts ganz Gerades gezimmert
|
||
werden”</em> — “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight
|
||
thing was ever made” — which Berlin treats as a summary of his
|
||
position.<a href="#fnref25" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn26"><p>Berlin, Isaiah. <em>Four Essays on Liberty</em>.
|
||
Oxford University Press, 1969. Includes “Two Concepts of Liberty”
|
||
(1958) — the distinction between negative and positive liberty — and
|
||
related essays in which Berlin develops the case that genuine human
|
||
values are plural, sometimes incommensurable, and frequently in
|
||
conflict.<a href="#fnref26" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn27"><p>Gray, John. <em>Isaiah Berlin</em>. HarperCollins,
|
||
1995; republished by Princeton University Press, 1996, under the
|
||
title <em>Isaiah Berlin: An Interpretation of His Thought</em>.
|
||
Gray’s interpretive study argues that value pluralism is Berlin’s
|
||
central and most enduring contribution, and that Berlin’s pluralism
|
||
is categorically distinct from both relativism and subjectivism:
|
||
pluralism names the objective condition that a plurality of genuine
|
||
goods exists and that human choice between them cannot be eliminated
|
||
without eliminating what is distinctive about human life.<a
|
||
href="#fnref27" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn28"><p>Stroh, John. <em>The Philosophical Foundations of
|
||
the Village Project: A Framework for Digital Sovereignty and
|
||
Pluralist AI Governance</em>. My Digital Sovereignty Ltd, February
|
||
2026. Documents the three-layer constitutional architecture, the six
|
||
irreducibly different moral frameworks (deontological,
|
||
consequentialist, virtue, care, communitarian, indigenous
|
||
relational), the five Alexander principles codified as Tractatus
|
||
rules (Deep Interlock, Structure-Preserving Transformation,
|
||
Gradients, Living Process, Not-Separateness), and the thirteen
|
||
wisdom traditions at Layer 3. Available as the source document for
|
||
the published material cited elsewhere in these references.<a
|
||
href="#fnref28" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn29"><p>Stroh, John. <em>Guardian Agents and the Philosophy
|
||
of AI Accountability: How Wittgenstein, Berlin, Ostrom, and Te Ao
|
||
Maori Converge in a Production Governance Architecture</em>. My
|
||
Digital Sovereignty Ltd, March 2026. Published at <a
|
||
href="https://mysovereignty.digital/articles/guardian-agents-philosophy.html"
|
||
class="uri">https://mysovereignty.digital/articles/guardian-agents-philosophy.html</a>.
|
||
Licence: CC BY 4.0 International.<a href="#fnref29"
|
||
class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn30"><p>Ostrom, Elinor. <em>Governing the Commons: The
|
||
Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action</em>. Cambridge
|
||
University Press, 1990. The author cites the 1990 book as the
|
||
primary source for polycentric governance and nested enterprises;
|
||
Ostrom’s later work on social-ecological systems extends this
|
||
foundation and is incorporated into the Tractatus framework’s
|
||
treatment of inter-village federation.<a href="#fnref30"
|
||
class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn31"><p>Alexander, Christopher, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray
|
||
Silverstein. <em>A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings,
|
||
Construction</em>. Oxford University Press, 1977. The 253 patterns
|
||
in the book form the methodological basis for the five
|
||
Tractatus-framework rules codified in <code>inst_090</code> through
|
||
<code>inst_094</code> — Deep Interlock, Structure-Preserving
|
||
Transformation, Gradients Rather Than Boundaries, Living Process,
|
||
and Not-Separateness. Alexander’s later work <em>The Nature of
|
||
Order</em> (Vols. 1–4, 2002–2004) develops the theory of living
|
||
systems that the “Living Process” principle draws from.<a
|
||
href="#fnref31" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn32"><p>Stroh, John. <em>The Philosophical Foundations of
|
||
the Village Project: A Framework for Digital Sovereignty and
|
||
Pluralist AI Governance</em>. My Digital Sovereignty Ltd, February
|
||
2026. Documents the three-layer constitutional architecture, the six
|
||
irreducibly different moral frameworks (deontological,
|
||
consequentialist, virtue, care, communitarian, indigenous
|
||
relational), the five Alexander principles codified as Tractatus
|
||
rules (Deep Interlock, Structure-Preserving Transformation,
|
||
Gradients, Living Process, Not-Separateness), and the thirteen
|
||
wisdom traditions at Layer 3. Available as the source document for
|
||
the published material cited elsewhere in these references.<a
|
||
href="#fnref32" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn33"><p>The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance
|
||
(Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, Ethics)
|
||
were developed by the Global Indigenous Data Alliance. Published at
|
||
<a href="https://www.gida-global.org/care"
|
||
class="uri">https://www.gida-global.org/care</a>. Referenced in the
|
||
operator’s constitution and values page.<a href="#fnref33"
|
||
class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn34"><p>Te Mana Raraunga — Māori Data Sovereignty Network,
|
||
established 2015, publishes the principles of Māori data sovereignty
|
||
at <a href="https://www.temanararaunga.maori.nz/"
|
||
class="uri">https://www.temanararaunga.maori.nz/</a>. The six
|
||
principles — rangatiratanga, whakapapa, whanaungatanga, kotahitanga,
|
||
manaakitanga, kaitiakitanga — are cited throughout this paper and
|
||
are cited in the operator’s constitution and in the Guardian Agents
|
||
philosophy article.<a href="#fnref34" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn35"><p>Stroh, John. <em>Guardian Agents and the Philosophy
|
||
of AI Accountability: How Wittgenstein, Berlin, Ostrom, and Te Ao
|
||
Maori Converge in a Production Governance Architecture</em>. My
|
||
Digital Sovereignty Ltd, March 2026. Published at <a
|
||
href="https://mysovereignty.digital/articles/guardian-agents-philosophy.html"
|
||
class="uri">https://mysovereignty.digital/articles/guardian-agents-philosophy.html</a>.
|
||
Licence: CC BY 4.0 International.<a href="#fnref35"
|
||
class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn36"><p>Stroh, John. <em>The Philosophical Foundations of
|
||
the Village Project: A Framework for Digital Sovereignty and
|
||
Pluralist AI Governance</em>. My Digital Sovereignty Ltd, February
|
||
2026. Documents the three-layer constitutional architecture, the six
|
||
irreducibly different moral frameworks (deontological,
|
||
consequentialist, virtue, care, communitarian, indigenous
|
||
relational), the five Alexander principles codified as Tractatus
|
||
rules (Deep Interlock, Structure-Preserving Transformation,
|
||
Gradients, Living Process, Not-Separateness), and the thirteen
|
||
wisdom traditions at Layer 3. Available as the source document for
|
||
the published material cited elsewhere in these references.<a
|
||
href="#fnref36" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn37"><p>Stroh, John. <em>The Philosophical Foundations of
|
||
the Village Project: A Framework for Digital Sovereignty and
|
||
Pluralist AI Governance</em>. My Digital Sovereignty Ltd, February
|
||
2026. Documents the three-layer constitutional architecture, the six
|
||
irreducibly different moral frameworks (deontological,
|
||
consequentialist, virtue, care, communitarian, indigenous
|
||
relational), the five Alexander principles codified as Tractatus
|
||
rules (Deep Interlock, Structure-Preserving Transformation,
|
||
Gradients, Living Process, Not-Separateness), and the thirteen
|
||
wisdom traditions at Layer 3. Available as the source document for
|
||
the published material cited elsewhere in these references.<a
|
||
href="#fnref37" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn38"><p><em>Village Federation</em>. My Digital Sovereignty
|
||
Ltd, published at <a
|
||
href="https://mysovereignty.digital/federation.html"
|
||
class="uri">https://mysovereignty.digital/federation.html</a>.
|
||
Bilateral federation contract template with layered consent model.
|
||
Cited as the public description of the federation architecture
|
||
referenced in Section 3.1 and Section 6.3 of this paper.<a
|
||
href="#fnref38" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn39"><p><em>Constitution of My Digital Sovereignty
|
||
Ltd</em>, Version 1.2.0, effective 2025-11-20, last updated
|
||
2026-03-27. Published at <a
|
||
href="https://mysovereignty.digital/constitutions/my-digital-sovereignty-ltd.md"
|
||
class="uri">https://mysovereignty.digital/constitutions/my-digital-sovereignty-ltd.md</a>
|
||
in English, German, French, Dutch, and te reo Māori.<a
|
||
href="#fnref39" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn40"><p><em>Our Values</em>. My Digital Sovereignty Ltd,
|
||
published at <a href="https://mysovereignty.digital/values.html"
|
||
class="uri">https://mysovereignty.digital/values.html</a>. Six core
|
||
principles: Sovereignty First, Privacy as Default, Pluralism Over
|
||
Homogeneity, Transparency and Accountability, Safety Without
|
||
Surveillance, Sustainable Business Model. Cited here as the
|
||
published summary of the operator’s values commitments.<a
|
||
href="#fnref40" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn41"><p><em>Our Philosophy</em>. My Digital Sovereignty
|
||
Ltd, published at <a
|
||
href="https://mysovereignty.digital/philosophy.html"
|
||
class="uri">https://mysovereignty.digital/philosophy.html</a>. Four
|
||
core principles under which the Tractatus framework’s commitments
|
||
are summarised: Human Agency, Data Sovereignty, Community First,
|
||
Radical Transparency. The page also lists the philosophical
|
||
influences the framework draws on, including Ostrom, Te Mana
|
||
Raraunga, the CARE Principles, and cooperative-enterprise theory.<a
|
||
href="#fnref41" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn42"><p><em>Village AI: A Sovereign Small Language Model
|
||
Approach</em>. Article 5 in the AI Governance for Communities
|
||
series, My Digital Sovereignty Ltd, March 2026. Published at <a
|
||
href="https://mysovereignty.digital/articles/ai-governance-series-05.html"
|
||
class="uri">https://mysovereignty.digital/articles/ai-governance-series-05.html</a>.
|
||
Particular reference to the section <em>Resisting Drift Toward
|
||
Global-Internet Norms</em>, which documents value drift in AI models
|
||
trained on internet-scale data and the architectural responses to
|
||
it.<a href="#fnref42" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn43"><p><em>Village AI: A Sovereign Small Language Model
|
||
Approach</em>. Article 5 in the AI Governance for Communities
|
||
series, My Digital Sovereignty Ltd, March 2026. Published at <a
|
||
href="https://mysovereignty.digital/articles/ai-governance-series-05.html"
|
||
class="uri">https://mysovereignty.digital/articles/ai-governance-series-05.html</a>.
|
||
Particular reference to the section <em>Resisting Drift Toward
|
||
Global-Internet Norms</em>, which documents value drift in AI models
|
||
trained on internet-scale data and the architectural responses to
|
||
it.<a href="#fnref43" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn44"><p>Stroh, John. <em>Guardian Agents and the Philosophy
|
||
of AI Accountability: How Wittgenstein, Berlin, Ostrom, and Te Ao
|
||
Maori Converge in a Production Governance Architecture</em>. My
|
||
Digital Sovereignty Ltd, March 2026. Published at <a
|
||
href="https://mysovereignty.digital/articles/guardian-agents-philosophy.html"
|
||
class="uri">https://mysovereignty.digital/articles/guardian-agents-philosophy.html</a>.
|
||
Licence: CC BY 4.0 International.<a href="#fnref44"
|
||
class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn45"><p><em>Village AI: A Sovereign Small Language Model
|
||
Approach</em>. Article 5 in the AI Governance for Communities
|
||
series, My Digital Sovereignty Ltd, March 2026. Published at <a
|
||
href="https://mysovereignty.digital/articles/ai-governance-series-05.html"
|
||
class="uri">https://mysovereignty.digital/articles/ai-governance-series-05.html</a>.
|
||
Particular reference to the section <em>Resisting Drift Toward
|
||
Global-Internet Norms</em>, which documents value drift in AI models
|
||
trained on internet-scale data and the architectural responses to
|
||
it.<a href="#fnref45" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn46"><p><em>Village AI: A Sovereign Small Language Model
|
||
Approach</em>. Article 5 in the AI Governance for Communities
|
||
series, My Digital Sovereignty Ltd, March 2026. Published at <a
|
||
href="https://mysovereignty.digital/articles/ai-governance-series-05.html"
|
||
class="uri">https://mysovereignty.digital/articles/ai-governance-series-05.html</a>.
|
||
Particular reference to the section <em>Resisting Drift Toward
|
||
Global-Internet Norms</em>, which documents value drift in AI models
|
||
trained on internet-scale data and the architectural responses to
|
||
it.<a href="#fnref46" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn47"><p><em>Village AI: A Sovereign Small Language Model
|
||
Approach</em>. Article 5 in the AI Governance for Communities
|
||
series, My Digital Sovereignty Ltd, March 2026. Published at <a
|
||
href="https://mysovereignty.digital/articles/ai-governance-series-05.html"
|
||
class="uri">https://mysovereignty.digital/articles/ai-governance-series-05.html</a>.
|
||
Particular reference to the section <em>Resisting Drift Toward
|
||
Global-Internet Norms</em>, which documents value drift in AI models
|
||
trained on internet-scale data and the architectural responses to
|
||
it.<a href="#fnref47" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn48"><p>Stroh, John. <em>Guardian Agents and the Philosophy
|
||
of AI Accountability: How Wittgenstein, Berlin, Ostrom, and Te Ao
|
||
Maori Converge in a Production Governance Architecture</em>. My
|
||
Digital Sovereignty Ltd, March 2026. Published at <a
|
||
href="https://mysovereignty.digital/articles/guardian-agents-philosophy.html"
|
||
class="uri">https://mysovereignty.digital/articles/guardian-agents-philosophy.html</a>.
|
||
Licence: CC BY 4.0 International.<a href="#fnref48"
|
||
class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn49"><p><em>From Help Widget to Global Services: How
|
||
Village Communities Support Each Other</em>. My Digital Sovereignty
|
||
Ltd, April 2026. Published at <a
|
||
href="https://mysovereignty.digital/articles/support-services-tuakana-teina.html"
|
||
class="uri">https://mysovereignty.digital/articles/support-services-tuakana-teina.html</a>.
|
||
Five-phase tuakana-teina mentoring roadmap; whakapapa-not-badges
|
||
recognition commitment; koha-basis access in Phase 4.<a
|
||
href="#fnref49" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn50"><p><em>From Help Widget to Global Services: How
|
||
Village Communities Support Each Other</em>. My Digital Sovereignty
|
||
Ltd, April 2026. Published at <a
|
||
href="https://mysovereignty.digital/articles/support-services-tuakana-teina.html"
|
||
class="uri">https://mysovereignty.digital/articles/support-services-tuakana-teina.html</a>.
|
||
Five-phase tuakana-teina mentoring roadmap; whakapapa-not-badges
|
||
recognition commitment; koha-basis access in Phase 4.<a
|
||
href="#fnref50" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn51"><p>The project “Taming Ecosystem Power of Platforms
|
||
through Contract and Competition Law” is an FWO-funded research
|
||
project at the University of Antwerp Faculty of Law, with Jan Blockx
|
||
(tenure-track assistant professor, European economic law) as
|
||
principal investigator, covering 2022–2025. The project develops an
|
||
ecosystem-based legal model integrating three aspects of platform
|
||
power — the platform as gatekeeper to the platform, as legislator of
|
||
the relationships within the ecosystem, and as contractual actor
|
||
with rights and responsibilities within the ecosystem. The
|
||
three-function model as used throughout this paper is cited from
|
||
public project summaries; the author of this paper has not read the
|
||
project’s full book-length output and does not cite it directly.<a
|
||
href="#fnref51" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn52"><p>Li, Yibo. “Characterising Ecosystem Power: the Use
|
||
of Pricing and Contractual Leverages.” <em>Utrecht Law Review</em>,
|
||
Volume 21, Issue 1 (September 2025), pp. 4–18. DOI:
|
||
10.36633/ulr.1097. Introduces ecosystem power as distinct from
|
||
traditional market power and bargaining power; identifies pricing
|
||
and contractual leverages as key mechanisms through which platforms
|
||
influence welfare distribution among participants; proposes
|
||
distributive equity as an additional antitrust consideration.<a
|
||
href="#fnref52" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn53"><p>The project “Taming Ecosystem Power of Platforms
|
||
through Contract and Competition Law” is an FWO-funded research
|
||
project at the University of Antwerp Faculty of Law, with Jan Blockx
|
||
(tenure-track assistant professor, European economic law) as
|
||
principal investigator, covering 2022–2025. The project develops an
|
||
ecosystem-based legal model integrating three aspects of platform
|
||
power — the platform as gatekeeper to the platform, as legislator of
|
||
the relationships within the ecosystem, and as contractual actor
|
||
with rights and responsibilities within the ecosystem. The
|
||
three-function model as used throughout this paper is cited from
|
||
public project summaries; the author of this paper has not read the
|
||
project’s full book-length output and does not cite it directly.<a
|
||
href="#fnref53" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn54"><p>Li, Yibo. “Characterising Ecosystem Power: the Use
|
||
of Pricing and Contractual Leverages.” <em>Utrecht Law Review</em>,
|
||
Volume 21, Issue 1 (September 2025), pp. 4–18. DOI:
|
||
10.36633/ulr.1097. Introduces ecosystem power as distinct from
|
||
traditional market power and bargaining power; identifies pricing
|
||
and contractual leverages as key mechanisms through which platforms
|
||
influence welfare distribution among participants; proposes
|
||
distributive equity as an additional antitrust consideration.<a
|
||
href="#fnref54" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn55"><p>Berlin’s value pluralism is further discussed in
|
||
the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Value Pluralism (<a
|
||
href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/value-pluralism/"
|
||
class="uri">https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/value-pluralism/</a>).
|
||
The SEP entry is cited here rather than the primary texts because
|
||
SEP provides an authoritative synthesis of Berlin’s position across
|
||
<em>Four Essays on Liberty</em> and the subsequent literature.<a
|
||
href="#fnref55" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn56"><p>Ostrom, Elinor. <em>Governing the Commons: The
|
||
Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action</em>. Cambridge
|
||
University Press, 1990. The author cites the 1990 book as the
|
||
primary source for polycentric governance and nested enterprises;
|
||
Ostrom’s later work on social-ecological systems extends this
|
||
foundation and is incorporated into the Tractatus framework’s
|
||
treatment of inter-village federation.<a href="#fnref56"
|
||
class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn57"><p>Alexander, Christopher, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray
|
||
Silverstein. <em>A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings,
|
||
Construction</em>. Oxford University Press, 1977. The 253 patterns
|
||
in the book form the methodological basis for the five
|
||
Tractatus-framework rules codified in <code>inst_090</code> through
|
||
<code>inst_094</code> — Deep Interlock, Structure-Preserving
|
||
Transformation, Gradients Rather Than Boundaries, Living Process,
|
||
and Not-Separateness. Alexander’s later work <em>The Nature of
|
||
Order</em> (Vols. 1–4, 2002–2004) develops the theory of living
|
||
systems that the “Living Process” principle draws from.<a
|
||
href="#fnref57" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn58"><p>Berlin, Isaiah. “The Pursuit of the Ideal.” 1988
|
||
Agnelli Prize lecture. Reprinted in <em>The Crooked Timber of
|
||
Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas</em>, edited by Henry
|
||
Hardy, Princeton University Press, 1990. The essay is Berlin’s most
|
||
explicit mature statement of the view that the plurality of genuine
|
||
human values is a condition of human life rather than a regrettable
|
||
obstacle to the construction of a unified moral framework. The title
|
||
of the volume alludes to Kant’s line <em>“Aus so krummem Holze, als
|
||
woraus der Mensch gemacht ist, kann nichts ganz Gerades gezimmert
|
||
werden”</em> — “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight
|
||
thing was ever made” — which Berlin treats as a summary of his
|
||
position.<a href="#fnref58" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn59"><p>Berlin, Isaiah. <em>Four Essays on Liberty</em>.
|
||
Oxford University Press, 1969. Includes “Two Concepts of Liberty”
|
||
(1958) — the distinction between negative and positive liberty — and
|
||
related essays in which Berlin develops the case that genuine human
|
||
values are plural, sometimes incommensurable, and frequently in
|
||
conflict.<a href="#fnref59" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn60"><p>Gray, John. <em>Isaiah Berlin</em>. HarperCollins,
|
||
1995; republished by Princeton University Press, 1996, under the
|
||
title <em>Isaiah Berlin: An Interpretation of His Thought</em>.
|
||
Gray’s interpretive study argues that value pluralism is Berlin’s
|
||
central and most enduring contribution, and that Berlin’s pluralism
|
||
is categorically distinct from both relativism and subjectivism:
|
||
pluralism names the objective condition that a plurality of genuine
|
||
goods exists and that human choice between them cannot be eliminated
|
||
without eliminating what is distinctive about human life.<a
|
||
href="#fnref60" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn61"><p>MacIntyre, Alasdair. <em>After Virtue: A Study in
|
||
Moral Theory</em>. University of Notre Dame Press, 1981 (first
|
||
edition); second edition 1984; third edition 2007. MacIntyre argues
|
||
that modern moral discourse is a fragmentary survival from older
|
||
shared traditions and that contemporary ethical debate proceeds
|
||
without the teleological framework that would allow it to reach
|
||
agreement. Cited in Section 2.2 as one pillar of the scholarship on
|
||
the communal-to-individualist shift that background the author’s
|
||
values-stickiness diagnosis.<a href="#fnref61" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn62"><p>Taylor, Charles. <em>Sources of the Self: The
|
||
Making of the Modern Identity</em>. Harvard University Press, 1989.
|
||
Taylor’s historical and analytical argument that modern identity has
|
||
drawn on diverse and sometimes incompatible moral sources, and that
|
||
atomism — the view that the individual is the sole legitimate locus
|
||
of value — is a cultural condition rather than a natural one. See
|
||
also Taylor, <em>The Ethics of Authenticity</em> (Harvard University
|
||
Press, 1991) for the shorter statement of the malaise-of-modernity
|
||
thesis.<a href="#fnref62" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn63"><p>Bellah, Robert N., Richard Madsen, William M.
|
||
Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton. <em>Habits of the
|
||
Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life</em>.
|
||
University of California Press, 1985. Empirical-interpretive study
|
||
of the tension between individualism and community in late-modern
|
||
American society; the first-language vocabulary that names the
|
||
problem for much subsequent communitarian-liberal debate.<a
|
||
href="#fnref63" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn64"><p>Putnam, Robert D. <em>Bowling Alone: The Collapse
|
||
and Revival of American Community</em>. Simon & Schuster, 2000.
|
||
Empirical documentation of declining social capital — participation
|
||
in civic associations, informal social networks, and trust-based
|
||
collective action — in the United States over the second half of the
|
||
twentieth century. Cited in Section 2.2 as empirical corroboration
|
||
of the shift the author’s pre-Village work was responding to.<a
|
||
href="#fnref64" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn65"><p>Sandel, Michael J. <em>Democracy’s Discontent:
|
||
America in Search of a Public Philosophy</em>. Harvard University
|
||
Press, 1996. Argues that procedural liberalism — the view that
|
||
political philosophy should be neutral on substantive conceptions of
|
||
the good — has crowded out the republican tradition in which
|
||
citizens share responsibility for cultivating the qualities of
|
||
character necessary for self-government. Sandel’s later work,
|
||
notably <em>What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets</em>
|
||
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), extends the argument to the
|
||
marketisation of goods that ought not to be for sale.<a
|
||
href="#fnref65" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn66"><p>Piketty, Thomas. <em>Capital in the Twenty-First
|
||
Century</em>. Translated from the French by Arthur Goldhammer,
|
||
Harvard University Press, 2014 (originally published in French as
|
||
<em>Le capital au XXIe siècle</em>, Éditions du Seuil, 2013).
|
||
Long-run empirical analysis of capital concentration dynamics under
|
||
modern capitalism; Piketty’s central claim — that when the rate of
|
||
return on capital exceeds the rate of economic growth, inequality
|
||
tends to widen over the long run — is cited here only as part of the
|
||
background scholarship on concentration dynamics, not as a claim
|
||
about which the paper takes a position.<a href="#fnref66"
|
||
class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn67"><p>Sy.Digital. <em>Agentic Organizational Structure: A
|
||
New Paradigm for Digital Sovereignty</em>. Internal whitepaper,
|
||
document code STO-INN-0002, iteration 2, dated 22 April 2025. Author
|
||
John Stroh (with AI assistance). The document’s Executive Summary
|
||
describes a shift from knowledge-control hierarchies to
|
||
quadrant-based organisation around time horizons and information
|
||
persistence; its Section 1.1 argues that traditional organisational
|
||
hierarchies were designed around knowledge control as a primary
|
||
organising principle and that the fundamental premise of
|
||
hierarchical organisation breaks down when knowledge is universally
|
||
accessible through AI; its Section 10 is entitled <em>Beyond
|
||
Bureaucracy</em>. The document is cited here as an internal, dated
|
||
artifact of the author’s own intellectual development and is quoted
|
||
verbatim where relevant. Full text available on request to the
|
||
author; not publicly published.<a href="#fnref67"
|
||
class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn68"><p>Te Mana Raraunga — Māori Data Sovereignty Network,
|
||
established 2015, publishes the principles of Māori data sovereignty
|
||
at <a href="https://www.temanararaunga.maori.nz/"
|
||
class="uri">https://www.temanararaunga.maori.nz/</a>. The six
|
||
principles — rangatiratanga, whakapapa, whanaungatanga, kotahitanga,
|
||
manaakitanga, kaitiakitanga — are cited throughout this paper and
|
||
are cited in the operator’s constitution and in the Guardian Agents
|
||
philosophy article.<a href="#fnref68" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn69"><p>The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance
|
||
(Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, Ethics)
|
||
were developed by the Global Indigenous Data Alliance. Published at
|
||
<a href="https://www.gida-global.org/care"
|
||
class="uri">https://www.gida-global.org/care</a>. Referenced in the
|
||
operator’s constitution and values page.<a href="#fnref69"
|
||
class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn70"><p>Stroh, John. <em>The Philosophical Foundations of
|
||
the Village Project: A Framework for Digital Sovereignty and
|
||
Pluralist AI Governance</em>. My Digital Sovereignty Ltd, February
|
||
2026. Documents the three-layer constitutional architecture, the six
|
||
irreducibly different moral frameworks (deontological,
|
||
consequentialist, virtue, care, communitarian, indigenous
|
||
relational), the five Alexander principles codified as Tractatus
|
||
rules (Deep Interlock, Structure-Preserving Transformation,
|
||
Gradients, Living Process, Not-Separateness), and the thirteen
|
||
wisdom traditions at Layer 3. Available as the source document for
|
||
the published material cited elsewhere in these references.<a
|
||
href="#fnref70" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn71"><p>Stroh, John. <em>Guardian Agents and the Philosophy
|
||
of AI Accountability: How Wittgenstein, Berlin, Ostrom, and Te Ao
|
||
Maori Converge in a Production Governance Architecture</em>. My
|
||
Digital Sovereignty Ltd, March 2026. Published at <a
|
||
href="https://mysovereignty.digital/articles/guardian-agents-philosophy.html"
|
||
class="uri">https://mysovereignty.digital/articles/guardian-agents-philosophy.html</a>.
|
||
Licence: CC BY 4.0 International.<a href="#fnref71"
|
||
class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn72"><p><em>Governing AI in Community and Not-for-Profit
|
||
Contexts: AI in the Service of Mission</em>. Article 2 in the AI
|
||
Governance for Communities series, My Digital Sovereignty Ltd, March
|
||
2026. Published at <a
|
||
href="https://mysovereignty.digital/articles/ai-governance-series-02.html"
|
||
class="uri">https://mysovereignty.digital/articles/ai-governance-series-02.html</a>.
|
||
Particular reference to the section <em>Mission Drift Through
|
||
Technology Adoption</em>.<a href="#fnref72" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn73"><p><em>Village AI: A Sovereign Small Language Model
|
||
Approach</em>. Article 5 in the AI Governance for Communities
|
||
series, My Digital Sovereignty Ltd, March 2026. Published at <a
|
||
href="https://mysovereignty.digital/articles/ai-governance-series-05.html"
|
||
class="uri">https://mysovereignty.digital/articles/ai-governance-series-05.html</a>.
|
||
Particular reference to the section <em>Resisting Drift Toward
|
||
Global-Internet Norms</em>, which documents value drift in AI models
|
||
trained on internet-scale data and the architectural responses to
|
||
it.<a href="#fnref73" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
<li id="fn74"><p><em>From Help Widget to Global Services: How
|
||
Village Communities Support Each Other</em>. My Digital Sovereignty
|
||
Ltd, April 2026. Published at <a
|
||
href="https://mysovereignty.digital/articles/support-services-tuakana-teina.html"
|
||
class="uri">https://mysovereignty.digital/articles/support-services-tuakana-teina.html</a>.
|
||
Five-phase tuakana-teina mentoring roadmap; whakapapa-not-badges
|
||
recognition commitment; koha-basis access in Phase 4.<a
|
||
href="#fnref74" class="footnote-back"
|
||
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
|
||
</ol>
|
||
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|
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