› Part Three review instrument · v0.5 · 22 Sep 2026
Does the Bill of Rights pass the book's eight tests?
Part Three of the book says any proposal for governing cyberspace must pass eight tests, which the book calls the eight criteria. Chapter Twelve then proposes a charter: five rights, seven further tests, and one enforcement method of last resort. This page lays the eight criteria against the five rights and the seven tests and asks, cell by cell, whether each right or test actually does what the criteria demand. Every cell opens to a reason in plain English, and says whether the reason comes from the book or is the instrument's own judgement.
How to read this
Key · the eight criteria, five rights and seven tests, each explained in a line
- the criteria recall (or “the arithmetic”)
- the paragraph at the top of Chapter Twelve that restates the eight criteria and says the five rights deliver answerability while the seven tests deliver the capacity condition: five plus seven
- the derivation sentence
- the last sentence of each right's paragraph, naming the criteria that right was written to satisfy. This is what makes a cell ●
- the score
- the paragraph at the end of Chapter Twelve that marks the whole proposal against the eight criteria
- the fork
- the charter's enforcement of last resort. Because code is open, identity is portable and shared records are shared, a population being abused can take all three and set up a rival
- foreclosure
- a sphere of life has been “totalised” (taken over entirely by one kind of power) when any one of the five rights is shut off within it
- in the path / automatic
- enforced at the moment an action happens (a key signs, a payment settles, a log entry is written) rather than checked afterwards by an institution
- the base layer (“substrate”)
- identity, connection, compute and money, as opposed to the thinking layer: the AI systems that reason with people
- the setpoint
- a control-engineering word: the target a governor holds a system at. Here, the direction a community has chosen, as opposed to the mechanism that holds course
- the two levels
- the charter is a short universal list (“the floor”); each community's own constitution is a long list that can add what the charter leaves out, such as key recovery or reversing a fraud
- the Trinity
- the book's three kinds of totalisation: everything ruled by the Individual, the Market, or the Collective. “Leans toward” in the tables means which of the three a right or test favours
● the book says it was written for this○ helps with it as a side effect△ pulls against it· no contactrestates the bookthe instrument's judgement, open to dispute
The distinction in the last two marks matters for review. A green-underlined cell restates what the draft says, so disagreeing with it is disagreeing with the manuscript. A grey cell is the instrument's own reading, so disagreeing with it is a note for the instrument.
How the three lists connect
Eight criteria on the left, five rights in the middle, seven tests on the right. A thick line is a ● cell: the book says the right was written for that criterion, or the test is what keeps that right usable. A thin line is a ○ cell: helps as a side effect. Each right has its own colour and every line takes the colour of the right it passes through, so the same colour reads leftwards (which criteria the right answers) and rightwards (which tests keep it usable). Hover or tap a criterion to follow its path through the rights and on into the tests; tap a right to see what feeds it and what it feeds.
By criterion
Pick a criterion. You get its wording, what it means, the failure in the book it was learned from, which rights and tests serve it, and where it is under strain.
Grid A — the eight criteria against the five rights
Grid B — the eight criteria against the seven tests
Grid C — the five rights against the seven tests
Here the question changes: not “does this meet a criterion” but “does this test keep this right usable, or get in its way”. Rows are rights, columns are tests: ● the test is what keeps this right usable in practice; ○ the test has some bearing on it; △ the test asks for something the right's own wording resists; · no contact.
All masters is the criterion the rights were most obviously written for: three of the five carry it as their main purpose and a fourth supports it. Checkability is the criterion the tests serve best: three tests exist for it and none pulls against it. Grid C shows something the book does not yet say out loud: the seven tests land almost entirely on two rights, create and collectivise. The other three (identity, connection, money) are base-layer rights guarded by the fork, not by a test. So the charter has two enforcement regimes, the fork for the base layer and the tests for the thinking layer, and create and collectivise are where both can be seen working at once.
The realistic chooser produces eight △ cells across the two grids, more than any other criterion, and always for the same reason: nearly every right and most tests quietly assume a person who holds keys, configures routes, moves between providers, reads justifications or understands what they sign, which is the very person the book says the harm removes. Latency produces four △ among the tests: Arm's Length, the Census, No Monoculture and Informed Signature cannot act at machine speed and were never meant to. The capacity condition is met by no right at all, which is by design (the tests carry it) and was also the review's first point.
How the five rights depend on one another
Separating the two loops changes four things the book should say. No Monoculture gets a job the text never assigns it: where more than one genuinely different system exists, enforcement is exit and cheap; where none does, enforcement degrades to the fork and becomes a collective project with a ruinous price, so the test is the condition that keeps enforcement individual. The two loops pay different prices to different parties: exit’s price is the switching cost, which Walk-Away and portable identity bound and the incumbent controls only through lock-in; the fork’s price is the cost of defending a rival against network value, which the incumbent sets outright, so the reviewer’s “exit priced by the incumbent” lands on the fork and only partly on exit. Exit does not set an objective: you leave one governor for another and accept its setpoint, so exit enforces the charter (you can always leave a foreclosed sphere) but only the fork can enforce a constitution (governing the thing together); a single exit is a departure, not enforcement, and disciplines the incumbent only in aggregate, when many leave, which is collective in effect without being collective in coordination. And the realistic-chooser tensions split along the same line: exit presumes competence, the fork presumes coordination. The right to collectivise remains exercised by the very faculty the seven tests protect, so the criteria recall’s arithmetic still hides a sequence: capacity comes before voice.
Forkability across the cognitive stack
The fork is the charter's enforcement of last resort, so whether a layer can be forked is whether the charter can be enforced there. The book's own audit scores each layer of the cognitive stack for checkability (can outsiders see whether it keeps its rule); this table scores the same layers for forkability (can a dissenting population leave, rebuild the layer's function under its own rules, carry across what it built, and keep pace afterwards, at a cost not set by the incumbent's goodwill). Two premises first. Open code is the least of it: the code at every layer is already open, and forking it costs one command. What a fork actually needs is open code plus a portable identity plus the shared state, plus two conditions the Steem precedent hid because a blockchain meets them automatically: the legal right to do it, and the cost of keeping up afterwards. And forking the artefact (copy the weights, run them elsewhere) is not forking the governor (take the power to set the objective elsewhere: retrain, re-decide the corpus, change what the assessor measures). The charter needs the second, because a population that can only copy the incumbent's last decision has escaped nothing.
Five conditions, each scored 0 to 4, out of 20. Copy: can the layer's state be taken complete, in a form a fork can run? Recipe: can it be regenerated or changed from source, so the fork can set its own objective rather than inherit one? This is the governor condition. Right: is the fork lawful and licensed, with no clause a state or the incumbent can invoke against it? Fare: what does it cost to stand up at parity, and to stay at parity while the incumbent keeps moving? Destination: does the population arrive somewhere real, with identity, reputation and coordination intact, or arrive as nobody with nothing? Bands: 16–20 forkable; 11–15 forkable with a named defect; 6–10 forkable downstream only (the artefact copies, the governor cannot be replaced); 0–5 not forkable. Position at 21 Sep 2026; scores are a first pass meant to be attacked.
One web, one spoke per layer of the stack, running clockwise from the bottom of the stack (data, weights, compute) through inference to the layers above it (evaluations, memory, identity). The green shape is each layer’s total forkability out of 20, so a full web would be a stack a population could leave anywhere and a collapsed one a stack it cannot leave at all; the dot colour is the verdict band. The dashed orange line is the recipe condition alone (scaled to the same rim), the part that decides whether a fork can set its own objective, which is where the web pulls in hardest.
The fork's cost is set at the layer below. Inference is forkable only where weights are; weights are forkable upstream only where compute is available and the recipe is published; the recipe is worth having only where the corpus can be reassembled. So the price of exit at any layer is a sum whose largest term comes from beneath it, and a portable layer sitting on an unforkable one is a passenger with a ticket and no train. Read against the checkability audit the order inverts in one place: memory is the readiest layer for checkability and only middling here, because what checkability certifies (custody of the log) is not what a person would need to carry (the relation the system derived from it).
“Open” has been redefined by the party that benefits: the word now covers releases that fail three of the five conditions, so the charter should not use it without a grade attached. Continuation is the condition nobody scores: a copy is a snapshot, the incumbent is a stream, and a forkability claim that omits what happens next year is a claim about archives. And forkability and checkability sometimes pull apart: at evaluations the sealed test set is the checkable object and the unforkable one, so forkability there attaches to the assessor, not the test; at data, the doors that make the corpus checkable (refusing unlicensed crawlers) are the enclosures that make a fresh corpus unforkable.
Read against the two return loops above: Destination scores exit (is there somewhere to go, and do you arrive as yourself) and Recipe scores the fork (can the rival set its own objective). Where this touches the charter: Walk-Away scores the copy; the right to create needs the recipe, which is why Grid C marks Walk-Away as necessary and not sufficient for it. The audit's recommendations for the book: state the fork right as a price ceiling on exit (portable identity, balances, memory and open code are the ceiling's terms); put the artefact-versus-governor distinction beside “possession is not the property”; add to No Monoculture that a licence with a user cap, a revisable acceptable-use policy or a revocation term does not count toward plurality, and that exclusive data licensing to one lab is a monoculture one layer down; and record that the fork right is a right to keep pace, not a right to a copy. Full dossier: Stack Forkability Audit v0.1, 21 Sep.
Three speeds, by design
- To constitute oneself
- To connect
- To create
- To transact
- On the Record
- Show Your Working
- Walk-Away
- To collectivise
- Arm's Length
- Informed Signature
- Writing and amending the charter
- Escalating a disputed interpretation to a wider jurisdiction
- A hearing: someone with standing compels a response
- The Census
The division of labour: what the substrate executes, what an institution must
Almost nothing in the charter runs wholly at one speed. Each right, test and enforcement route has a part that code executes automatically and a part that only a human institution can do: decide, appoint, fund, ratify, adjudicate. The table splits every item along that line and names the institution the human part needs. The share column reads left to right, machine to human: each ▮ is a fifth executed by the substrate, each ▯ a fifth that needs an institution.
Read down the share column: the four base-layer rights and the three automatic tests are machine work with a human residue that belongs to the second level (recovery, reversal, a standard set once); the right to collectivise, Arm’s Length, the Census and everything to do with authoring, amending and adjudicating are human work with a machine residue that records and executes the outcome. Informed Signature and the fork are the two designed splits: in each the log or the code is in the path and the understanding or the deliberation is not, and the charter’s honest claim is that the slow part is done before the fast part is needed. What no row shows is a mechanism that moves an institution’s decision into the substrate; the charter can name the institutions it needs and cannot conjure them, which is where the assembly is weakest and where a protocol vote, a DAO vote or a court has to be written in by name.
The apparent conflict between speed and voice comes from a wobble in the book's own wording. The preface states latency relatively, “within the response time of the thing it constrains”, and a constraint on a community's own decision meets that at human speed. The derivation paragraph then treats latency as machine speed throughout, which is what makes the human-speed instruments look like failures. The constraint moves at the speed of what it constrains; the direction is set at the speed of those who set it.
“Same speed, different direction” is a claim about the base layer, not about the community. Where the charter slows down, it does so on purpose, in named places, and everywhere else it does not slow at all.
The TL;DR page says “same velocity”. A velocity already includes a direction, so the book's wording, “same speed”, is the one to keep.Where the criteria pull against each other
If the eight criteria could never conflict, you would not need eight. They do, at specific points, and the charter is where it shows. For each pair: what brings it out, how the book currently answers it, and what is left unresolved.
Open questions from the review, 21 Sep
Raised by the book's philosophical reviewer. The middle column is where the grids already showed the point; the right column is what they did not show and now must.
Chapter Twelve will be rewritten so that the rights emerge from the criteria rather than being scored against them afterwards. The grids show this cannot be one right per criterion (all masters is carried by three rights, voice by two). What they support is rights emerging from foreclosures, each learned where a criterion was learned: lead with “Foreclosed by”, tell the case, let the right arrive as its negation. That is the form of the 1689 English Bill of Rights: thirteen abuses listed, then thirteen rights. The criterion-first view above is that structure, rendered before it is drafted.
Drafting of the charter is paused while the author reads constitutional theory, republicanism and the history of bills of rights, from Magna Carta and 1689 through the American amendments to the internet's own charters. This page is the working instrument in the meantime and will change as the reading does.
The three structural gaps
The three areas the review closed on. All open while the author reads.
Provision, by register
No test provides the faculty, which is Gap 1. A proposal from the third-party review (22 Sep): provision does not need a new institution if each of the Trinity’s three registers is allowed to supply it in its own way, and the Trinity then does the balancing it already does elsewhere. Each route pays in its own register’s coin, so each carries that register’s failure mode with it.
- The person’s own understanding is raised until they can exercise the standing themselves: the explanation, the warrant, the training that makes a justification readable again.
- What it provides: the faculty itself, kept in the person.
- Fails as: the realistic-chooser problem. It presumes the person can be upgraded and will spend the afternoon; the harm the book describes is what makes that presumption unsafe.
- Mutualise the faculty: a guild, union, co-operative or polity holds the checkers, the assessors and the expertise on its members’ behalf, and the member borrows it.
- What it provides: standing exercised by proxy, funded by the members.
- Fails as: the collective totalisation. The guild becomes the gate to the faculty, and the exit from the guild is what keeps it honest.
- Pay for the check: a checker bounty (the finder’s purse) that anyone, human or agent, can claim by doing the work the person cannot; provision priced and bought rather than taught or pooled.
- What it provides: the check, not the faculty; the person stays as they were.
- Fails as: the market totalisation. Contestation becomes something the well-funded have more of, and a bounty the incumbent can outbid is a bounty the incumbent owns.
Read as one instrument, the three routes are the Trinity applied to provision: the individual route keeps the faculty, the collective route keeps the standing, the market route keeps the check, and no single route does all three without reproducing its own register’s totalisation. That is the same balance the charter asks of the stack, and it suggests Gap 1 closes not with a provision clause but with a rule that a domain must leave all three routes open. Open: whether this sits inside minimality, and which test each route attaches to (the Census for the individual, Arm’s Length for the guild, the purse for the bounty).
Further dimensions — the rights
Column meanings. Speed: how fast the thing the right governs moves. Enforced by: automatic (in the path), structural (a property of the market), institutional (needs a body) or procedural (a required step). Chapter Nine: the book's four conditions for handing enforcement to code, D the rule is precise, C checking is far cheaper than doing, P several checkers not paid by the checked, E enforcement in the execution path; ✓ met, △ doubtful, ○ partly, ✗ not met. Leans toward: Individual, Market or Collective. Taken to the extreme: what each right becomes if it alone is maximised; each reproduces one of the three totalisations. The price-of-exit column and the “who can hold it” row are the reviewer's, from 21 Sep.
| Right | Speed | Enforced by | Chapter Nine | Leans toward | Taken to the extreme | Can a breach be undone? | Price of exit · who sets it |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| constitute oneself | machine | automatic (the key) | D✓ C✓ P✓ E✓ | Individual | the sovereign individual, the recluse | a revoked name yes, by forking; a lost key no | near zero if the identity is portable; your whole self if it is not · whoever owns the identity standard |
| connect | machine | automatic (routes) | D✓ C✓ P✓ E✓ | none | a channel no community may govern within | yes; a cut wire is re-routed | the cost of a second route · the carrier and the state |
| create | machine | automatic for access; structural for supply | D△ (what counts as “inspectable”?) C△ P△ E△ at weights and compute | Individual, Market | the capacity harm at full exposure | slowly; dependency once formed is a dial, not a switch | the cost of retraining, or of a second lab · whoever holds the weights and the compute |
| transact | machine | automatic (settlement) | D✓ C✓ P✓ E✓ | Market | market totalisation, everything priced | a frozen account yes, by leaving; a reversed payment no | the liquidity you leave behind · the incumbent rail and its network effect |
| collectivise | human | institutional, with exit as the automatic guard | D△ (“exit priced”: how much?) C○ P○ E○ (the fork) | Collective | the collective as a condition, exits closed | yes while exit stays open; no once it closes | “priced, never closed”, undefined; rises with network value (GHash 2014, Super League 2021) · the collective itself |
| who can hold it | Each of the five can be exercised by a present adult who has the faculty. None can be exercised by a child, by a person not yet born, or by a person who has lost the faculty, and the charter says nothing about how any of them acquires or recovers it. The veil question asks about descendants; the rights answer only to the living and competent (review, 21 Sep). | ||||||
Further dimensions — the tests
“Provides / protects / measures” is the reviewer's three-way split of 21 Sep, replacing “detects / binds”. A test that provides would supply the faculty; one that protects stops it being taken; one that measures records whether it was. Nothing provides.
| Test | Speed | Enforced by | Chapter Nine | Leans toward | Provides / protects / measures | Failure looks like |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| On the Record | machine | automatic (the log) | D✓ C✓ P○ E✓ | none | protects (a record exists or it does not) | an objective changed without a mark |
| Arm's Length | human | institutional | D△ C✓ P△ (who pays the assessor?) E✗ | Collective | measures | a captured or defunded assessor |
| Show Your Working | machine | automatic | D✓ C△ (checking a justification can cost as much as producing one) P✓ E✓ | Individual | protects | a fabricated justification that passes |
| the Census | generational | institutional | D△ C✗ P△ E✗ | Collective | measures | the loss goes unmeasured |
| No Monoculture | capital (investment cycles) | structural | D△ (“genuinely different”) C○ P✓ E✗ | Market | protects, as a condition of the field; fails to correlated error | consolidation wherever the capital sits, or five names for one pipeline |
| Walk-Away | machine | automatic | D✓ C✓ P✓ E✓ | Individual | protects | lock-in by memory |
| Informed Signature | human | procedural | D○ C○ P△ E○ (the log is automatic; the understanding is not) | Collective | protects, procedurally | the rubber stamp with a transcript |
| none | No test provides the faculty. That is the column the review asked for, and it is empty; the primary-goods gap is where a provision would go. | |||||
Read together: the rights lean toward the Individual and the Market, the tests toward the Collective, so the whole assembly only balances when both lists are read as one instrument, and a reader who stops at the five rights will find the charter more libertarian than it is. On Chapter Nine's conditions the assembly is strong wherever enforcement is automatic and weak wherever it needs an institution. Two tests measure, four protect, one is a condition of the field, and none provides.