Plain, precise definitions of the terms used in the essay. Where a term names something still being built, it says so.
Robustness. In Olivier Hamant’s sense, the capacity of a system to remain stable in the short term and viable in the long term despite fluctuation. It is built on heterogeneity, redundancy, slowness, incoherence and margin. It is not resilience, which is the capacity to return to a prior state after a shock; robustness is about staying inside a viable region without needing to bounce back.
Performance. Efficacy plus efficiency: reaching the objective with minimum means. Zero stock, just-in-time, tight coupling. An excellent adaptation to a stable world with abundant resources, and the thing that converts a small perturbation into a systemic one.
Counterproductivity. Ivan Illich’s term, borrowed by Hamant: the threshold past which each further increment of performance reduces robustness. Beyond it, getting better at the thing makes you worse at surviving it.
Viability theory. The mathematics associated with robustness, named by Hamant after Jean-Pierre Aubin. Instead of a trajectory towards an optimum, a bounded region a system must stay inside. Cited here as Hamant invokes it; the primary mathematical literature is not read in this essay.
Normal accident. Charles Perrow’s term. In systems that are both highly complex and tightly interdependent, accidents are properties of the configuration rather than anomalies to be engineered out. The question is when, not whether.
Syndemic. Hamant’s framing of Covid: not simply a disease, but a disease of an over-optimised system, where the pathogen meets a hyper-connected and hyper-optimised world and the two compound.
Consanguinité — design inbreeding. Hamant’s term for two distinct failures. Models producing content and then feeding on content they produced. And, more broadly, the convergence of architecture, objective and evaluation across a small number of near-identical systems, so that the whole field shares its blind spots.
Falling asleep at the wheel. The second AI failure Hamant names. When a system performs well, humans trust it, and over time stop checking. Combined with degradation, it produces people trusting ever less reliable systems ever more.
Durer et transmettre. To last and to transmit. Hamant treats this as a deep human drive, and the reason writing matters: humans are the only living beings with access to very long time, and writing is how we get it.
Fragility and vulnerability. A distinction Hamant takes from Cynthia Fleury. Fragility belongs to objects, which break irreversibly. Vulnerability belongs to living things, which can be wounded and heal. A record that corrects by annotation rather than deletion is vulnerable rather than fragile. Cited as Hamant reports her, not from her own texts.
Structure-Preserving Transformation. One of five Christopher Alexander principles carried as design criteria in the Tractatus framework. Changes must preserve the system’s essential structure: audit logs stay interpretable across versions, and prior governance decisions stay valid. In practice, correction of governance and approval records proceeds by annotation, and the model refuses an edit rather than accepting one. Erasure is a separate, gated path, because a right to erasure requires that deletion be possible.
Deep Interlock. Alexander principle: services consume and validate one another’s output rather than judging in isolation. Hamant’s engineering image for the same idea is the airliner with three independent autopilots — redundancy plus genuine independence, so one failure does not correlate with the next.
Gradients Rather Than Boundaries. Alexander principle: governance operates on intensity levels rather than a binary switch. The published gloss is that living systems adapt gradually while mechanical systems snap.
Not-Separateness. Alexander principle: governance belongs in the critical execution path rather than bolted on afterwards. The framework publishes its own limitation here — invocation is still voluntary, so an agent that declines to call the governance tools can bypass them. That gap is named, not closed.
Living Process. Alexander principle: the framework evolves from documented failures and observed edge cases rather than from a predetermined specification. Alexander’s stronger constraint is that each step should act on the product of the previous one, and that structure generated in large lumps from a master plan is the paradigm case of a structure-destroying process.
Rule by Nobody. Hannah Arendt’s name for authority that is real while nobody is answerable for it: an intricate system of offices in which no one can be held responsible. Not the absence of rule, but tyranny without a tyrant, distinguished by there being nobody left to argue with. The practical test in this project is simpler than the theory: when the terms change under you, who do you ring?
Thoughtlessness. Arendt’s term, routinely flattened in retelling. Not stupidity and not conviction, but a capacity for thinking left unexercised in conditions that made not exercising it comfortable.
Aggregation. Constructing a representation of a person from material they did not send, for purposes they were not present to contest. Profiling, cross-tenant inference and behavioural composition are its forms. The essay argues it should be barred at the constitutional layer, and the bar is on the operator and the inference layer rather than on communities doing relational work such as whakapapa.
Three-layer constitutional architecture. The governance model underneath the platform. Layer 1 holds commitments a tenant cannot edit, delete or mint through the platform’s own surfaces, and which are checked against model output at runtime. Layer 3 holds tradition-specific commitments, which is where Simone Weil’s account of attention shapes how the platform handles grief.
Situated language layer. A language model serving a particular community with its own registers and silences, rather than a globally averaged model. The Institut Michel Serres reaches the same commitment from the other direction, describing its work as connaissances situées et impliquées — situated and implicated knowledge.
Competition, collaboration, cooperation. Hamant’s three-term distinction, in which the English polarity runs backwards from the French. Competition advances your project at the expense of others. Collaboration advances individual projects and hopes the sum adds up, which he judges a win-win that makes someone else lose. Cooperation advances a common objective ahead of the individual one, sometimes at a cost to your own performance.
Appel à commun. A call that constitutes a common, as against an appel à projet, a competitive call in which funders rank individual bids. One is a pooling mechanism and produces pooling behaviour; the other is a ranking mechanism and produces ranking behaviour. Nobody has to become more generous.
Kaitiakitanga. Guardianship as obligation towards what is governed, rather than authority over it. It states the same inversion as Simone Weil’s claim that obligations precede rights, from a tradition that arrived there first and independently.
Te Pou Tupua. The human face of Te Awa Tupua under the Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act 2017, exercising the rights and carrying the duties of a legal person that has standing and no voice.
Sovereign record. A record that is signed, sealed and timestamped, so that its holder can prove what was said and when without depending on the continued goodwill of whoever runs the servers. Slower to write than a mutable row, and deliberately so.