Painting Scenes

I. The grass

It is late in the day and the sun beats harshly on worn bodies. Something large, perhaps a hunted animal filled with tantalizing meat, has been brought down and lies in the grass between a dozen people who have not eaten. All of them want it, and all of them know the others want it, because each can see the rest leaning in as they stand huddled around the object.

A hand goes out. So does every other hand. Then, for a reason none of them could have put into words, the hands stop. Reach any further and the person beside you reaches too, and what follows will not be dinner; it will be violence. So the arm stays where it is, half extended, aimed at the thing it did not take. Pointing.

This is the first sign, what Eric Gans purports is the theory of human origins and thus all social sciences. It no longer grabs; it designates. Everyone made the same gesture at the same moment, so everyone understands it, and what it says is this. The thing it points at has changed in the process. It is no longer only meat. It has become a center: the sacred object everyone attends to and no one may simply take. The people around it are the periphery. The pause itself, the space that opened between wanting and taking, Gans calls deferral (as in, the deferral of violence).

The next evening the grass is empty. One of them walks to the spot and points again. But there is nothing there, and a gesture that points at nothing cannot mean this. It can only mean bring it here.

The designation of the object lives in the present scene, but a demand lives in the interval between being said and being met, which means it lives in the future. The people who must answer it, the ones who will go out tomorrow, now have something to gather around that is not lying in the grass. They have the hunt: who goes, who leads, who gets which cut when they come back. They will need their own pause and their own pointing. A second, smaller scene has formed inside the first one's demand.

From this originary scene, human civilization and all its great institutions are thus fractally born. As such, it should be possible to construct any institution out of the grammar and axioms that have been born from the originary; to truly understand the base inception of any historical institution and any that will be born of demands issued from centers into the infinite future.

II. The question

We should say plainly what we are trying to do, because it’s quite easy to make seemingly small epistemic mistakes in trying to make an ideology generative that are actually catastrophically unproductive.

The body of work that runs from Gans through Adam Katz, now gathered under the name center studies, has a vocabulary seductive enough to explain anything after the fact. You can drape any successful institution in the vocabulary of center studies, the same way you can drape it in Porter's five forces or the hero's journey, and it will look as if the theory saw it coming. Justification after the fact speaks to the transcendental nature of the theory of center studies, but does little to be predictive of new institutions once the core tenets are well understood.

The inverse is much harder. Start from a handful of claims about scenes, centers and signs, follow them and nothing else, and see whether you arrive at the shape of an institution you could actually build, before anyone has told you it worked. That is the question this essay tries to answer: can center studies be made generative, so that the mechanical follows from the abstract instead of the abstract being fitted to the mechanical?

Our answer is a qualified yes, which we will attempt to show by constructing previous institutions out of a set of definitions, axioms and propositions outlined in the appendix.

Any institution at its core, paints scenes. It marks the center, arranges the periphery, and gives everyone a sign to use instead of their hands. The rest of this essay is an attempt to describe how they work precisely enough that someone else could do it on purpose.

III. OIID

The bracketed labels below (D for definitions, R for relations between the forms) are collected in the appendix and introduced properly in the next section; on a first read they can be skipped.

Go back to the grass. The hunters have been gone for two days. The demand, bring it here, has not been met, and the people waiting can do nothing about that except ask: where are they? Someone who walked the ridge that morning answers: they are past the river.

With that, the group has all four of the sentence forms Gans and Katz build everything on. Each one was born because the one before it could not do its job [R1].

The ostensive [D10, this] points at a center everyone can see. It needs the object present and asks nothing except that others look. When the object is absent, the pointing turns into the imperative [D11, bring it], a demand that someone make it present. When the demand cannot be met right away, questions or requests for more information birth the interrogative [D12, where is it?]. And when there is no thing to hand over, the answer has to describe what is absent. That is the declarative [D13, it is past the river], the form that lets language speak about anything at all, including what no one present has seen. In short, these forms are generated by the one prior, and can be seen as escalating attempts to reduce mistakenness [D9].

The forms answer each other in fixed pairs [R2]. Gans's favorite example is the operating room: the surgeon says "Scalpel!" and the nurse, handing it over, says "Scalpel." An imperative is answered by an ostensive, and a question is answered by a statement. They also nest. Every question contains a demand, and every statement contains a pointing at its subject.

Furthermore, we must understand Katz’s: "ostensives now give off imperatives" [A4]. Once something is a center, its existence alone issues a demand: keep looking at me, keep me intact. Imperatives are not one form among four. They are the force running through all of them, and a statement has force only to the extent that some center stands behind it and would enforce it.

The ostensive, as mentioned before, lives in the present, but the imperative is generative of the future. Before bring it here there was only what was in front of you. After it, there is the interval between a demand and its fulfillment, and everyone involved has to live inside that interval: plan for it, wait in it, organize around it. Social time, the future that people plan and owe and borrow against, is the imperative's gap [A5]. Everything an institution does takes place inside these imperative gaps. The interrogative serves to prolong these social gaps.

In an institution, the four forms run as a circuit. A statement backed by a center, such as a law, a contract or a rating, issues demands. A demand fulfilled puts something in front of people, which is a new this. A new this that others want generates new demands and questions, and the answers settle into new statements. An institution is a scene that keeps that circuit turning without the pause breaking.

IV. Seven axioms and a theorem

To illustrate this, we establish a more formal, conveniently notated vocabulary and resultant set of axioms/propositions that form the basis for understanding most institutions as scene painters. D marks a definition, A an axiom, P a proposition derived from them, R a relation between the four forms, K a claim about kingship and T a claim about tokens (both explained in section V). The definitions D1 to D21 are listed in full in the appendix. Sources are marked [Gans], [Katz], or [ours] for extensions made in this essay. We have tried to make this set as minimal as possible.

The seven axioms:

A1. Mimesis. Desire converges: people come to want what others want. [Gans]

A2. Deferral or violence. Convergence without a pause ends in conflict, so a scene [D6] exists only where deferral [D2] holds. [Gans]

A3. Occupancy. Every center after the first is occupied [D7] by something: an object, a person, an office, a rule. [Katz]

A4. Emission. Every occupied center issues imperatives [D11], at the very least the imperative to keep itself in place. [Katz]

A5. The gap. No imperative is fulfilled instantly. The interval between demand and fulfillment is never zero, and that interval is future time. [Gans]

A6. Mistakenness. No sign lands exactly as intended. Every demand, rule or statement is carried out by people who copy it imperfectly, so at its edges it either asks for something no one can supply, reaches people it was not meant for, or misses people it was. That shortfall between what a sign asks for and what actually happens is a misfire [D9]. [Katz]

A7. Debt. A center keeps the peace among the people gathered around it, and they owe it something in return: attention, fees, obedience, loyalty, data. Because peace has to keep being provided, the debt is never paid off once and for all. It is a standing claim on what the periphery will do in the future [D8]. [Katz]

From these follows the claim that sits underneath everything else here.

P1. Scene generation. Every scene except the first forms inside the gap of an imperative issued by an existing center. [ours]

The proof is the story on the grass, told without the grass. A center issues a demand [A4]. For a while, what it demands is absent [A5]. That absent thing is now wanted by the center that asked for it, by everyone attending to that center, and by anyone who could profit from supplying it [A1]. Supplying it takes many people whose gestures can collide over who does the work, who is paid and who gets credit, so they need a pause of their own [A2]. The pause produces signs [D3], and the signs mark a new center [D4]: the fulfillment of the parent’s demand. That new center is soon occupied [A3], and it issues demands of its own [A4], which open new gaps [A5]. The process repeats at every scale, from an empire down to a team of four.

Base case. The scene on the grass was not born of anyone’s imperative but instead of a dozen people converging on something that was simply there [D1] out of mimetic desire. Every axiomatic system needs a starting point, and Gans’s originary scene is this one.

P1a. Fulfillment and misfire. Because every demand misfires somewhere [A6], its gap produces two kinds of scenes. Fulfillment scenes form around carrying the demand out as given. Misfire scenes form around what the demand cannot reach: the part nobody can supply, or the part the demand gets wrong. As we will see, genuinely new kinds of institutions almost always start as misfire scenes.

From these, we construct propositions.

P2. An institution is a scene that outlives its gap. A fulfillment scene dissolves when its demand is met or withdrawn, unless it gives itself a center [D4] that does not depend on the job. Institutionalization is the conversion of a temporary errand into a permanent reference. [P1, A5] [ours]

P3. Children can outgrow parents. When a child scene comes to exceed its parent on whatever the parent depends on, the dependency flips. If the parent, or a center above it, recognizes this, it is succession [D18]; if not, it is usurpation [D15]. We can show both cases. In 1980 IBM, then the center of computing, needed an operating system for its new PC and handed the job to a small company, Microsoft: a fulfillment scene. Microsoft kept the right to license the same system to other manufacturers, and as cheap clones spread, the software standard came to matter more than the hardware brand. On the thing the PC depended on, the child had exceeded the parent. IBM never recognized the shift. It fought it with OS/2 and lost, and the center passed to Microsoft without anyone handing it over: usurpation. We see a more legitimate succession with Pixar. It began in 1991 as a fulfillment scene for Disney’s demand for computer-animated films, came to make better ones than Disney’s own studio, and in 2006 Disney bought it and put Pixar’s leaders, Ed Catmull and John Lasseter, in charge of Disney Animation: the parent handing its center to the child, which is succession. [A3] [ours]

P4. The horizon is the gap. A scene lives about as long as the demand that made it. Deliver this today makes a scene that lasts a day. Build this cathedral makes one that lasts a century. Credit is the gap turned into something that can be traded. [A5, A7] [ours, Katz]

P5. The pattern is self-similar. Because P1 applies at every level, the same structure, with a center, a periphery, a debt and four kinds of sentence, shows up in a civilization, a state, a firm and a team. That is why the four layers of an institution [K1] can be audited at any scale. [ours]

V. Kings, tribute and tokens

The center on the grass (the sacred object, likely meat) belonged to no one. That did not last. In Gans’s history, the first person to stand where the sacred object stood was the Big Man of Melanesian ethnography [D16]: someone who gathered pigs and yams through work and obligation, then gave them away at feasts he hosted. Everyone attended to him and the goods flowed through him. He had to keep earning the position by giving, and he drew a resentment no sacred object ever had, the periphery’s question: why him and not me? His taking of the center is the first usurpation [D15].

From there the line runs through the chief, the sacral king and the state. Gans treats the line with suspicion: every person at the center is a usurper to be checked, and history is the slow spreading-out of the center through monotheism, markets and democracy. Katz disagrees, and for anyone building an institution, his correction is the more useful one. The center, he argues, is always occupied [A3]. The real question is whether it is occupied openly, with authority and responsibility in the same hands, and whether the occupant can choose a successor who will choose well in turn [D18] (for example: Anthropic’s management structure). We take Katz as the design rule and Gans as the risk model: someone will occupy your center, so decide who and how, and expect the resentment that occupancy breeds.

We derive some propositions on kingship:

K1. The king is the four sentences in one body. He is seen (the crown, the court, the procession), which is the ostensive [D10]. He commands, the imperative [D11]. He judges petitions and disputes, the interrogative [D12]. And he is succeeded by a law and a line that outlive him, “the king is dead, long live the king,” the declarative [D13]. We can give these four functions names a builder can use: the Shrine, the Apparatus, the Protocol and the Constitution. A company is a small kingship reassembled. [ours]

K2. Resentment rises when tribute outruns judgment. The Big Man was tolerated while he redistributed. An occupant that collects tribute [D17] faster than it gives judgment the periphery accepts as fair is inviting someone to take the center from it. [D16, A7] [Gans, ours]

K3. A center lasts as long as its succession works. A center whose occupancy cannot pass without breaking its deferral has a lifespan of one occupant. [D18, A2] [Katz]

The last piece is the one that makes this a theory of the present and not only of the past. Katz, writing as Dennis Bouvard, calls utterances “tokenized deferrals,” and says that to speak in sentences is to draw on and issue lines of credit. A token [D19] is a pause made portable. It carries a settled scene into places the scene itself cannot reach, so that the deferral can be used without being re-enacted. Words are tokens. So are coins, shares, deeds, ratings, and the units a language model reads. Data [D20] is debt paid in a new currency, legibility, and measurement [D21] is the center’s demand to be made legible.

Similarly, on tokens:

T1. A token is only as good as the center behind it. A token is a compressed declarative, and a declarative has force only when a center backs it [D14]. When the backing goes missing, the token slides back down the four sentences in exactly Gans’s order of genesis [R1]: holders stop pointing at it, start demanding redemption, then start asking whether it is backed at all. The bank runs of the Great Depression are an excellent illustrated example. [ours]

T2. Tokens trade force for reach. Every step a token travels from its scene extends the center’s reach and thins its presence. [T1, D19]. For example, Superscription in Commanding Heights outlines what this means for the dollar/neodollar. [ours]

T3. Whoever records the data occupies a center. Its power is the completeness of the record, and its characteristic resentment is one-way visibility: a periphery fully legible to a center that stays opaque to it. [D20, K2] [ours]. This is the center justification for systems of record.

T4. A language model is the declarative industrialized. It is a center built out of the periphery’s recorded signs, compressed into tokens, that answers any question with a statement. When statements become almost free, value moves to what statements cannot produce: presence [D10], judgment with force behind it [D12, D14], and demands actually carried out [D11]. [T3, D13] [ours]

T5. A protocol can try to occupy a center by itself, but never completely. A rule can stand where a person would. By A3, someone still occupies it in practice; the question is only how openly. [A3, K3] [ours]

VI. Constructions

A theory like this earns trust only if we can use our axioms and propositions to construct an institution generatively. As such, constructions below answer the same questions in the same order, citing which axiom or proposition licenses each step. What was the parent center, and what did it demand [A4, P1]? Why was there a gap [A5, P4]? Was the new scene fulfillment or misfire [P1a]? What became its center, and who stood there [D4, A3]? What did the periphery owe [A7, D17, D19]? Did it outgrow its parent, and who held the center next [P3, D18, K2, K3]?

The East India Company

On the last day of the sixteenth century, 31 December 1600, Elizabeth I signed a charter giving a group of London merchants the sole English right to trade east of the Cape of Good Hope.

• Parent and demand [A4, P1]. The Crown and the City demanded bring us the Asian trade, with a monopoly attached.
• Gap [A5, P4]. A round voyage took about two years. The gap was long and expensive, and so was the horizon.
• Kind of scene [P1a]. Fulfillment: it formed to carry out the Crown’s demand as given.
• Deferral [A1, A2]. Merchants converging on the same scarce profit pooled their capital in a joint stock, which deferred the fight over who bore each voyage’s risk.
• Center and tokens [D4, D19]. The monopoly was the center. Shares in the stock were its tokens, made permanent in 1657, which is the moment the scene outlived any single voyage [P2].
• Misfire [A6, P1a]. After Plassey, the Company won the right in 1765 to collect Bengal’s land revenue. A scene built to trade had become a scene that took tribute [D17].
• Inversion [P3]. In India the child exceeded its parent: armies, courts, and revenue larger than Britain’s own.
• Resentment [K2]. Its tribute ran far ahead of any judgment its subjects accepted, and the resentment broke open in 1857.
• Succession [D18, P3]. The Crown took direct rule in 1858 and dissolved the Company in 1874. The center passed back to the parent by Act of Parliament, but only after the peace broke in 1857: succession by reabsorption, not an orderly handover.

The House of Morgan

In November 1907, with New York’s trust companies failing, J. Pierpont Morgan gathered the city’s bankers in his library and, as the story is usually told, locked the doors until they agreed to a rescue.

• Parents and demands [A4, P1]. London capital demanded invest our money safely in America. The US government demanded keep the currency sound, but had had no central bank since 1836 and so no instrument to do it.
• Kind of scene [P1a]. Fulfillment first, as London’s trusted agent. Then misfire: the house formed around the lender-of-last-resort role the state’s demand required and the state could not perform.
• Center and occupant [D4, A3, D16]. The center was Morgan’s word. The occupant was Morgan himself, a Big Man in the strict sense, tolerated because he redistributed in a crisis.
• Inversion [P3]. On monetary stability, the one thing the parent most needed, the child exceeded the parent.
• Resentment [K2]. It arrived as the Pujo hearings on the “money trust” in 1912 and 1913.
• Succession [D18, P3]. The center passed to one the state built for itself, the Federal Reserve, in 1913, and in the 1930s the state split the house apart under Glass–Steagall. Its successor, JPMorgan Chase, is now the scene the Fed calls on to absorb a failing bank: a fulfillment scene [P1a] for the very center that replaced it.

Stripe

In 2010 a developer who wanted to charge for software had to apply for a merchant account and wait weeks.

• Parent and demand [A4, P1]. The card networks and their banks demanded underwrite every merchant before it touches a card.
• Gap [A5]. Weeks of paperwork, which a developer launching that weekend could not wait out.
• Kind of scene [A6, P1a]. Misfire. The demand could not reach the long tail of small online businesses, and Stripe formed in that part of it.
• Deferral [A2]. Stripe stood between the merchants and the networks’ rules and took on the risk of onboarding them itself.
• Center [D4]. The API, which turned accept this payment into a few lines of code.
• Tribute and data [D17, D20, T3]. A fee on every transaction, and a second tribute in data: every payment on the network trains the fraud system that judges the next one, which is the Protocol layer [K1] built out of tribute.
• Institutionalization [P2]. It gave itself a center before the gap closed, by becoming the default for builders and, through Atlas, appearing at a company’s incorporation before it takes a single payment.
• Succession [D18, P3, K3]. Still open. A parent above that can change the rules, child platforms below that may outgrow it, and a succession not yet tested.

OpenAI

When Google bought DeepMind in 2014, the race to general intelligence acquired an occupant.

• Parent and demand [A3, A4]. Google’s center issued an implicit demand to the field: build it here, on our terms.
• Kind of scene [P1a]. Misfire. OpenAI was founded at the end of 2015 around what that demand could not get: researchers and backers who would not accept one company holding the center. Sam Altman said as much in a 2015 email to Elon Musk, later made public: if the technology was going to be built anyway, it would be good for someone other than Google to build it first.
• Gap and horizon [A5, P4]. General intelligence had no date. The longest gap in these cases produced the longest horizon, and with it a scene able to justify spending on an almost unlimited scale.
• Center [D4, D10]. ChatGPT, launched on 30 November 2022, became within weeks the thing people pointed at when they said “AI.” The scene reached the ostensive almost at once.
• Succession [K3]. It reached the ostensive before its Constitution [K1] was settled, and paid for that a year later, when the board removed its chief executive and reinstated him within days.
• Tribute and resentment [D20, T3, K2]. Part of its tribute is the recorded signs of the whole periphery, and the resentment has taken exactly that form: publishers suing over what was taken to train it.

Bitcoin

The first block of the Bitcoin chain, mined on 3 January 2009, carries a line of text: The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.

• Parent and demand [A4, P1]. State money and the banks that keep its ledger demanded trust our ledger.
• Kind of scene [A6, P1a]. Misfire, and it said so itself: the first block is an ostensive [D10] aimed at the parent’s failure.
• Founding [D13]. It was founded by a declarative, the whitepaper. The whitepaper carried an imperative, run this and stop trusting the bank [A4], so the case still falls under P1.
• Deferral [A2]. Proof of work settles which history counts without anyone having to decide.
• Occupancy [A3, T5]. The founder’s disappearance emptied the human seat, much as monotheism emptied the sacred one. In practice miners, developers and large holders occupy the center, less openly than a king would.
• Tokens [D19, T1]. The coin’s force comes only from convergence on the ledger.
• Succession [D18, P3]. Open. The parent has begun absorbing the child: spot ETFs in 2024, and a US strategic reserve in 2025.

An idea: credit

The same axioms can construct ideas as well as institutions.

• Every demand opens a gap [A4, A5], and the periphery owes the center for the deferral it provides [A7]. Credit is that owed future made portable: the gap turned into a token [D19, P4].
• Interest is the price of the gap’s length. Default risk is mistakenness [A6, D9] measured against a model and priced [D21].
• Credit has force only while the center that would enforce it stays present [D14, T1]. When it goes absent, holders move from pointing to demanding to asking [R1]. That is a run.
• Prediction. Credit (and all its constructions, i.e. insurance) should expand where centers are present and trusted, and contract, sometimes in a single afternoon, where they are not. This is the familiar pattern of credit cycles, consistent with the axioms. If you’re interested in this, DM or email me :)

An idea: the brand

• A brand is an ostensive made portable: a this [D10] carried as a token [D19] into shops, streets and screens far from where the thing is made.
• By T1, its value is bounded by the presence of the center behind it, meaning the house, the workshop or the founder.
• By T2, every extension of reach thins that presence. A designer who licenses his name onto hundreds of unrelated products spends the center to buy reach. A house that refuses to, and keeps its goods scarce and its workshop visible, is protecting its force.
• Prediction. Brands that license widely gain revenue fast and lose their center slowly. Brands that ration reach compound. Perhaps, this is the center framework for strategies like Thrive Eternal (and has already been shown in comparing, for example, Hermes vs other luxury peers over the years).

VII. Running it forward

Everything in the last section is still hindsight, however disciplined. Our core question, however, remains: can the axioms tell you where to paint a scene before anyone has painted one? In order to do this, we must find the largest demands currently being issued by the largest centers [A4], measure their gaps [A5, P4], and ask what each demand cannot reach [A6, P1a].

Construction 1: the compute demand. The loudest demand of this decade is build the compute, and the power to run it, issued at once by states and by the handful of companies at the center of AI.

• Gap [A5]. Measured in years: turbines, transformers, interconnection queues.
• Fulfillment scenes [P1a]. Obvious and crowded: developers, contractors, suppliers.
• Misfire [A6]. The demand asks for assets that existing risk models cannot price [D21], such as chips that depreciate in three years and buildings whose value depends on a single tenant’s roadmap.
• Prediction [P2, D10]. The durable new institutions here will not be the ones that build fastest. They will bear the risk nobody else can price and then become the reference price for it, the this others point to when they ask what such an asset is worth, before the gap closes and the incumbents catch up.
• Early evidence [P1, P5]. The misfire scene issues a demand of its own, price this, and that opens a new gap. Spot, derivative and credit businesses focused solely on GPUs, with standardized pricing through exchanges and brokers, are already forming in it; it’s the same step but one level down.
• Succession [D18, P3]. Open, and the real test. The parents, the hyperscalers and the large AI labs, have every reason to bring GPU pricing and risk-bearing in house. An independent reference price survives only if no single parent can own it i.e. what S&P is to markets.

Construction 2: the agent demand. Every company deploying agents issues millions of small imperatives a day [D11]: do this.

• Gap [A5]. The agent does the thing in seconds, but an imperative is only fulfilled when the result is handed back and acknowledged [R2], like the nurse’s “Scalpel.” Nothing trustworthy hands that back yet, so the gap has moved from doing the act to confirming it.
• Misfire [A6, P1a]. Did it actually happen? That is a missing ostensive [D10]. Was it authorized? A missing interrogative [D12]. Who bears the loss if it was wrong? A missing declarative [D13]. Three forms are absent around one imperative that works too well.
• Prediction [P1a]. Misfire scenes will form exactly there: the record of what agents did, the adjudication of whether they were allowed to, and the balance sheet that absorbs their mistakes.
• Early evidence [P1a]. Data and RL companies are moving beyond raw data into environments and evals. An eval answers whether an agent’s action was right, which is the missing interrogative forming where the construction says it would.
• Prediction [P2]. Whoever becomes the reference record first will hold a center that outlasts the gap.
• Prediction [K2, T3]. Whoever collects agents’ activity as data without offering fair judgment in return will meet the Big Man’s resentment.
• Succession [D18, P3, T5]. Open. The AI labs and cloud providers may try to absorb the record and the evaluation layer into their own platforms, or continue to be okay with vassal structures in the form of data companies. These vassals themselves may be, or are already trying, to use their competencies to move value beyond the model layer (i.e. custom post-trained models).

Corollary: statement inflation [T4, T2]. A machine that produces statements at almost no cost lowers the value of every institution whose center is a statement. What it cannot produce is a present object [D10], a judgment someone is bound by [D12, D14], or a demand actually carried out [D11]. Value should keep moving toward scenes built on presence (places, objects, gatherings that cannot be copied) and toward judgment with force behind it.

What would refute this?

• a durable institution with no parent demand behind it that cannot be explained as a discovery [breaks P1];
• a child scene that clearly outgrew its parent and met no response at all: no reabsorption, no counter-center, no renegotiation [breaks P3];
• an institution whose judgment was accepted as fair and whose succession worked, destroyed by resentment anyway [breaks K2 and K3];
• a token that kept its value after the center behind it disappeared [breaks T1].

We have not found any of these yet.

VIII. Back to the grass

The hunters came back, or they did not. Either way the group on the grass learned something it would never unlearn: an imperative opens time, and the people who live inside that time will gather around something. If no one paints the scene for them, they paint it themselves.

The historically important institutions in this essay are the ones whose builders understood which demand they were living inside, saw the part of it that could not be met, and marked a center there before anyone else did. They then built the rest of the kingship around that center: something to be seen, something that commands, something that judges, and something that survives them. Those that failed usually painted a beautiful scene and neglected the judgment, or the succession, until the periphery took the center back.

These axioms in and of themselves will not tell you what to specifically build. They will, however, tell you where to look and what you will owe once you have built it. After all, someone is always pointing.

Appendix: the construction in full

Primitives: agent (a being that imitates and uses signs), desire (an agent’s pull toward taking an object), appropriation (the act of taking it). Everything below is built from these. Sources are marked [Gans], [Katz], or [ours].

Definitions

• D1. Convergence. Two or more agents desire and attend to the same object at once. [Gans]
• D2. Deferral. Agents in convergence hold back from taking, because each grab is checked by everyone else’s. [Gans, Katz]
• D3. Sign. The aborted grab, which, because everyone makes it, designates the object instead of seizing it. [Gans]
• D4. Center. Whatever convergent attention is aimed at while deferral holds. Its value is made by the convergence, not by its properties. [Gans]
• D5. Periphery. The agents converging on a center. [Gans]
• D6. Scene. A center, its periphery, and the signs that keep deferral in place. It lasts exactly as long as the deferral does. [Gans, Katz]
• D7. Occupant. Whatever stands at the center: object, person, office or rule. [Katz]
• D8. Debt. What the periphery owes the center for deferral: a claim on its future. [Katz]
• D9. Mistakenness. The unavoidable misfit between a sign and any use of it. [Katz]
• D10. Ostensive. This: a sign for a present center, satisfied by attention. Lives in the present. [Gans]
• D11. Imperative. Bring it: a sign for an absent object, satisfied when it is made present. Opens the future. [Gans]
• D12. Interrogative. Where is it?: an imperative satisfied by a sign rather than the object. [Gans]
• D13. Declarative. It is so: a sign that presents its object in absence, complete in itself, carrying a two-way imperative. [Gans, Katz]
• D14. Force. The degree to which a sign compels action. A declarative has force only if some center would enforce it. [Katz, ours]
• D15. Usurpation. Taking a center without recognition from its current occupant or from a center above it. The Big Man’s taking of the sacred center is the first case. [Gans, ours]
• D16. Big Man. The first human occupant, kept in place only by redistributing. [Gans]
• D17. Tribute. Debt [D8] paid to the occupant. [Katz]
• D18. Succession. A transfer of a center that its current occupant, or a center above it, recognizes. [Katz, ours]
• D19. Token. A deferral made portable, usable outside its scene. [Katz]
• D20. Data. Debt paid in legibility: the recorded traces of a periphery. [ours]
• D21. Measurement. A center’s demand to be made legible. A risk score is mistakenness measured and priced. [ours]

How the forms relate

• R1. Generation by failure. Ostensive fails, so imperative; imperative unmet, so interrogative; nothing to hand over, so declarative. [Gans, Katz]
• R2. Answer pairs. An imperative is answered by an ostensive, a question by a statement. [Gans]

Axioms

• A1. Mimesis. Desire converges. [Gans]
• A2. Deferral or violence. A scene exists only where deferral holds. [Gans]
• A3. Occupancy. Every center after the first is occupied. [Katz]
• A4. Emission. Every occupied center issues imperatives. [Katz]
• A5. The gap. No imperative is fulfilled instantly. [Gans]
• A6. Mistakenness. No sign lands exactly as intended; the shortfall between what it asks for and what happens is a misfire. [Katz]
• A7. Debt. The people around a center owe it for the peace it keeps, as a standing claim on their future. [Katz]

Propositions

• P1. Scene generation. Every scene but the first forms in the gap of an existing center’s imperative. [A1–A5] [ours]
• P1a. Fulfillment and misfire. The gap yields scenes that carry the demand out and scenes that form around what it cannot reach. [A6] [ours]
• P2. Institution. A scene becomes an institution when it acquires a center independent of its gap. [ours]
• P3. Inversion. A child that exceeds its parent on what the parent depends on becomes a center for it: succession if recognized, usurpation if not. [ours]
• P4. Horizon. A scene lives about as long as its gap. Credit is the gap made tradeable. [ours, Katz]
• P5. Self-similarity. The structure repeats at every scale. [ours]

Kingship and tokens

• K1. The king bundles the four forms: Shrine, Apparatus, Protocol, Constitution. [ours]
• K2. Resentment rises when tribute outruns accepted judgment. [Gans, ours]
• K3. A center lasts as long as its succession works. [Katz]
• T1. A token is only as good as the center behind it; without it, tokens decay in the order of R1. [ours]
• T2. Tokens trade force for reach. [ours]
• T3. Whoever records the data occupies a center, and risks one-way-visibility resentment. [ours]
• T4. A language model is the declarative industrialized; value moves to presence, judgment and execution. [ours]
• T5. A protocol can occupy a center, but by A3 someone always occupies it in practice. [ours]

Open questions

• Is discovery a second base case alongside the originary scene? If so, P1 is narrower.
• Can a declarative found a scene without carrying an imperative?
• Should magnitude (how many attend to a center, how intensely and for how long) become a defined term, with observable proxies to measure it? It would let a parent’s size predict its children’s.