Cohesion Spectrum, v.1.5 RFC

The first cohesion spectrum was simple and formed a nice acronym, CABIN. It had some zones right. It also had serious issues, but exposing them was helpful in this journey. When trying to find solutions for them, I realized two things. One is that I need to account for both the autonomy cost and autonomy gain of being within a particular coordination regime. After some iterations, it got substantially better, but I'm still not happy with it, so the second thing I realized is that I need help, hence this draft, which is an RFC, Request For Comments. Unlike IETF RFCs, the intention is not to be the de facto released version, but rather a way to get to a better one.

Two Kinds of Autonomy

To keep them both positive (high means more autonomy), partcipatory autonomy represents the inverse of autonomy cost. The autonomy gain is labeled consequential autonomy.

Now some more strict working definitions.

Participatory autonomy is the operative discretion available to participants within a coordination regime. It is the actual autonomy range remaining after complying with the regime's constraints. Operative discretion almost always differs from the formal one. A soldier may formally have the right to refuse unlawful orders, but operative discretion in a military hierarchy is near-zero regardless. An Amazon seller may formally be running their own business, but the commission rates, search ranking, return policies and delisting conditions are set unilaterally by the platform.

Consequential autonomy is the decision space made available to participants as a result of the coordination regime. Working for a company reduces dozens of everyday choices such as when to be where, what to work on, how to dress, but opens others that would not exist without the coordination regime: whether to pursue this client or that one, how to solve a technical problem within one's domain, which supplier to recommend, whether to raise a concern in the next meeting. These are not available to anyone outside the regime and are made possible by the company's coordination infrastructure and the employee's membership in it. When using HTTP, complying with the protocol's request-response conventions is non-negotiable, but doing so grants access to the entire web, a decision space that did not exist before the protocol.

The Zones

Oppressive

Both participatory and consequential autonomy approach zero. Physical force or legal non-personhood eliminates exit. Even concentration camp prisoners retained micro decisions such as the pace of work or small acts of solidarity, which is why the origin remains a theoretical limit rather than an occupied region. What characterizes oppressive regimes is that these residual discretions are functionally meaningless, and the regime contributes nothing to participant decision space because it is organized around elimination rather than enablement. Chattel slavery, Nazi concentration camps, and North Korean political prison camps are the paradigm cases.

Imperative

Coordination proceeds through issued directives. Deviation is detected and sanctioned. Participatory autonomy is uniformly suppressed across all instances, not because of a single rule but because exit is prohibitive. A soldier in combat cannot leave; a medieval serf usually could not; a nineteenth-century factory worker could technically quit but at prohibitive cost. Mechanism varies, but effective discretion is near-zero throughout.

What varies considerably is consequential autonomy. A well-organized army delivers logistics, collective intelligence, and operational reach unavailable to individuals. Feudal arrangements, though coercive, under the customary law (as opposed to the Roman law) gave the right to peasant to hunt and fish on the lord's land. Early factory work sat higher still: wages with purchasing power, urban infrastructure, residual exit rights. The zone is wide on the consequential axis and flat on the participatory axis.

Administrative

Coordination through formal, codified, impersonal rules. Participants have operative discretion. A civil servant can exercise professional judgment, invoke appeals, interpret regulations. That discretion is bounded by procedure and accountability structures. The zone covers both government and private instances. Nation-states and corporations, regulatory agencies and institutional churches, licensed professional bodies and universities all belong here. The relevant distinction is not public versus private but whether coordination proceeds through codified, impersonal rules enforced by procedure.

Rule of law is the core consequential contribution: property rights backed by institutional enforcement, contracts that will be honored, the ability to challenge decisions through formal mechanisms. These expand what participants can decide and do beyond what they could manage in isolation.

This zone is also where the responsibility-diffusion pathology is most prevalent. When decisions are made by policy rather than identifiable persons, accountability dissolves.

Technofeudal

The zone that shares the same low-participatory band as Imperative, at considerably higher consequential autonomy. The structural parallel is not metaphorical: the platform owner is a landlord. You bring your product, labor, or content; the platform unilaterally sets all terms and extracts rent for access. An Amazon seller cannot negotiate commission rates, search visibility, or return policy requirements. An Uber driver cannot negotiate fare rates or matching priority. A Facebook creator cannot negotiate what percentage of followers see their posts.

In a way, this zone is similar to the Imperative one. Force and directive authority have been replaced by network effects and switching costs. A seller who has spent years building reviews and sales history on a platform faces prohibitive migration costs. As platform scale grows, switching costs grow, exit becomes harder, and the platform dependency deepens. The consequential gain, such as market access, global reach and technical infrastructure, is real and substantial, which is why the arrangement is tolerated.

Platforms that present themselves as marketplaces belong here, not in the Agoric zone. The defining test is not market language but, first, whether participants can negotiate the terms of their participation, and second, the level and nature of power asymmetries.

The term technofeudalism was coined by Varoufakis .

Normative

Social pressure replaces formal enforcement. There is no arrest for norm violation, no algorithm enforcing ranking or manipulating feeds, no commander issuing directives. But exclusion is real and costly: loss of reputation, access to shared resources, and belonging. The enforcement mechanism is the community's collective capacity to make participation costly for violators.

This zone has wide internal variance. A housing association restricts paint colors and structural modifications while delivering only shared maintenance and property value protection. A scientific discipline provides an accumulated body of methodology, a peer-review infrastructure, citation networks, and shared instrumentation that no individual could replicate. Self-managing organizations, worker cooperatives, and holacratic structures sit at the higher-participatory end. Role-holders have authority within their domains and members govern collectively.

Agoric

Coordination through price signals and counterparty choice. You can walk away, return tomorrow, offer a counterprice, choose between sellers and buyers. No single actor controls the terms of the encounter. A commodity trader routing orders across multiple exchanges, a bazaar vendor setting a price knowing the buyer will counter, a freelance professional declining a client — all are exercising the high participatory autonomy that defines this zone.

The zone cannot stand alone. Currency stability, contract enforcement, property rights, and competition policy are Administrative-zone preconditions, not market outputs.

Market-enabling intermediaries belong here, not in Technofeudal. A traditional stock exchange, a clearing house and an auction platform facilitate rather than control exchange. The main test is whether participants can negotiate.

The name is problematic. But alternatives that fit better the rest of the zone names, such as Transactive or Transactional come with their issues.

Interoperable

Consequential autonomy stays very high throughout. Well-designed protocols create qualitatively new possibility spaces rather than improving access to existing ones. HTTP did not make existing communication faster. It made a global hyperlinked information space possible for the first time. The roundabout yield rule does not improve on traffic light performance. It enables drivers to negotiate gaps directly, simultaneously reducing fatalities and delays. The gain is categorical, not incremental.

Participatory autonomy varies widely within the zone. Some protocols leave no discretion. Any deviation from HTTP's request-response format fails to coordinate. Others build in meaningful choices. The AT Protocol lets participants decide where to host their data, which moderation service to use, and which feed algorithm to adopt.

Inter-Zone Relations and Movement

The bottom band shows a similar range for the participatory autonomy of classic feudalism and technofeudalism. The cost of the coordination in both cases is different kinds of lock-in, which anyway suppresses participatory autonomy in a similar way. What the Amazon seller has that the medieval serf did not is consequential autonomy: global market access at a scale the serf could not imagine.

Imperative, Administrative, and Technofeudal share a structural property: coordination flows through intermediaries with concentrated agency. A dashed boundary separates regimes organized around controlling (distinct from facilitating) intermediaries from those that are not. The meaning of this boundary can be better understood when comparing protocols with other ways of coordinating. Here are the slides and recording of a talk on that. There is also an article .

The middle of the map is where most large real-world organizations live. A startup moves from Normative (shared mission, informal trust) toward Administrative (formal HR, legal, compliance) as it scales. An Administrative organization under crisis slides toward Imperative as directive authority temporarily supersedes procedure. Nation-states under crisis also move into the Imperative zone. A professional community moves from Normative toward Administrative as it formalizes licensing and ethics codes. These trajectories are path-dependent and often irreversible. The overlapping region encodes the transitional character of most real organizations.

The Agoric zone's dependency on Administrative is asymmetric: Administrative zones can exist without markets (central-planning, theocracies), but markets cannot exist without Administrative infrastructure. Strip away contract enforcement and property rights, and exchange either retreats into the Normative zone (reputation-governed barter only) or gets captured by the most powerful participant, who becomes the platform —sliding across the Intermediated boundary into Technofeudal.

The Interoperable zone is not self-sustaining either. Its high consequential autonomy depends on Administrative infrastructure (standards bodies, dispute resolution, intellectual property enforcement) and Normative culture (the open-source ethos, cooperative standards development, shared technical values). Protocols emerge from communities.

Within the Interoperable zone, moving upward along it means achieving the same consequential expansion with more participatory flexibility. Protocols encode choices about how much discretion participants retain. Recent protocol design history can be read as a series of attempts to reclaim, at the protocol layer, the agency that platform capture had extracted.