2025-04-11, Governing by confusion

# This was a recursive response, not a policy error On April 2nd, 2025, the U.S. government announced a sweeping tariff policy, applying across all imports with immediately effect. Over the following week, the policy evolved rapidly: it expanded to cover additional categories, triggered immediate procurement responses, and by April 9th, a substantial portion of it was suspended.

Other parts, particularly those targeting Chinese imports, remained in place or were even intensified. This wasn’t a full reversal. It was a targeted redirection under pressure.

Across commentary, the moment was quickly situated within familiar analytical frameworks. Liberal interpretations treated it as institutional constraint on executive overreach. Marxist analysis described it as finance capital disciplining industrial policy. These readings weren’t incoherent—but they narrated the reversal as a moment of political contradiction or contestation, as if different outcomes had been materially possible. In reality, the system had already begun correcting the conditions they analyzed, mechanically and digitally, faster than even AI can produce the content. The explanations arrived as retroactive narrative stabilizers.

This was not an event, it was a recursive containment cycle. A signal processed through layers of feedback, stabilization, and narrative resolution. What looked like volatility was governance's recursive response.

This was a preemptive stabilization. It never opened new possibilities, invited contestation, or exposed the system to contingency. It was never allowed to become an "event". In Elizabeth Povinelli’s terms, it was a quasi-event: a disturbance already embedded in the logic of its own containment. What we witnessed was the preemptive stabilization of something that appeared volatile but never escaped its feedback bounds. The system registered it as another site for the management of looped labor.

The shifts in policy were not driven by public reception or political deliberation. They were triggered by system-internal constraints. As the tariffs entered operational and financial layers, procurement systems, pricing models, Treasury markets, the signal they carried exceeded what the system could carry forward without cost. Model deviation, liquidity stress, and delivery risk accumulated into a composite pressure. The system began rerouting, mechanically, not ideologically.

Interpretive responses didn’t cause this rerouting. They followed it. But they were not irrelevant. Once market and institutional behavior had adjusted, narrative stabilization became necessary. Political, financial, and media systems produced explanations that reframed the prior week’s volatility into structured outcomes. This interpretation didn’t clarify the event, it completed it.

This reiterative transformation aligns with long-standing systems theory: volatility is sensed, models diverge, corrective behavior activates, and narrative synthesis stabilizes the result. The tariff sequence wasn’t a failed policy. It was a processed deviation, metabolized by a system with no room for sustained misalignment.

# Volatility was system cycling, not confusion The initial reaction to the April 2 tariff policy was widely framed as confusion, political instability, incoherent messaging, or market panic. But what occurred was not a cognitive failure of systems. It was a structural process: a destabilizing input exceeded tolerance thresholds across systems that are built to detect, adjust to, and metabolize deviation.

Procurement systems responded first. Large retailers and distributors halted or delayed orders from key import sources, especially tariff-sensitive categories like electronics, auto components, and packaging. These decisions weren’t made through deliberation or protest. They were triggered by model misalignment: internal systems that manage cost forecasting, delivery risk and margin optimization crossed volatility thresholds and defaulted to pause.

Futures markets showed parallel behavior. Pricing derivatives began to spike, spreads widened, and traders rebalanced contracts. These actions were not expressions of belief or sentiment. They were algorithmic and institutional corrections to deviation from expected conditions. The inputs no longer matched the projections. Correction was the only available behavior.

What looked like market instability was in fact the first phase of what Norbert Wiener and Stafford Beer would both recognize as cybernetic feedback. The system detected an unmanageable change in input conditions and initiated self-correction, not from a central actor, but through distributed adaptation mechanisms. For sociologist Niklas Luhmann, whose systems theory emphasizes that institutions respond only to internally legible disturbances, this is information as selection, not understanding.

Volatility was not the error. It was the detection of error. And volatility was detected and converted. Traders hedged. Algorithms repriced. Analysts generated content. The deviation became throughput. Volatility, once processed, yielded value. It initiated interpretation in behavior, rather than discourse. Media theorist Wendy Chun, in Updating to Remain the Same, shows how modern systems preserve coherence by distributing correction over time—delay becomes a method of control.[cite:@chun_UpdatingRemainSame_2016]

# What looked like "market panic" was the system sensing its boundaries The sharp corrections in procurement, logistics, and bond markets following the tariff announcement were not signs of an irrational system. They were signs of a system under permanent constraint, operating close to its tolerances, and responding predictably to a new form of stress.

Cybernetician Stafford Beer, writing in the 1970s on how systems survive under pressure, proposed the Viable System Model—a framework for understanding how organizations reorganize themselves to maintain throughput without collapse. A viable system doesn’t require perfect information or planning, it requires enough feedback to test whether it can sustain current operations under new conditions.[cite:@beer_BrainFirm_1972] When the input exceeds those conditions, the system doesn’t collapse. It restricts throughput, withdraws from exposed sectors, and repositions resources. That’s exactly what happened here. Procurement halted because pricing and delivery projections fell out of operational range. That’s boundary-testing behavior, not chaos.

In The Human Use of Human Beings (1950), Norbert Wiener, founder of cybernetics, argued that information is a difference that makes a difference: systems don’t react to content—they respond to signal mismatch.[cite:@wiener_HumanUseHumanBeings_1950] It is a measurement of difference: a signal becomes meaningful only when it deviates from expected norms. In that sense, volatility isn’t noise, it’s the presence of information. The tariffs, and the yield shifts and procurement pauses they produced, were not side effects. They were the system’s core sensing behavior in action.

Information theorist Claude Shannon, whose 1948 work defined information as statistical deviation from expectation, helps clarify why volatility isn’t noise—it’s how systems detect signal.[cite:@shannon_MathematicalTheoryCommunication_1948] What appeared as “market overreaction” was actually the production of new information via deviation, Δ from forecasted prices, delivery reliability, or input costs. The more deviation, the more information. And the more information, the more correction required to preserve the system’s internal consistency.

Cultural theorist Lauren Berlant coined the term “crisis ordinariness” to describe how people and institutions adapt to ongoing instability by habituating to it through affective and procedural means. In 2 (2011), Berlant describes how systems and subjects adjust to ongoing constraint by managing it affectively and behaviorally.[cite:@berlant_CruelOptimism_2011] A crisis does not arrive as a rupture. It persists as a condition. These adjustments weren’t responses to a shock. They were boundary maintenance procedures in response to an input that briefly exposed the limits already structuring system behavior. But maintenance isn’t neutral. Boundary responses are defensive and often extractive. Cybernetic settlerism operates by converting deviation into differential advantage: pricing risk, hedging cost, reallocating flow. The system corrects and harvests correction.

# Debt didn't mediate the crisis: it measured it The tariff policy did not fail because of public backlash, political hesitation, or geopolitical miscalculation. It failed because it became incompatible with the U.S. fiscal system’s short-term operating constraints, specifically, its dependency on continuous debt issuance to sustain federal liquidity. Auctions didn’t collapse, but they moved far enough off-model to trigger behavioral shifts at the institutional level.

Debt, in this case, wasn’t an instrument of policy, it was an interface for constraint detection.

Since 2008, and even more acutely after 2020, the U.S. Treasury has shifted toward short-term debt instruments: four- to thirteen-week Treasury bills that must be rolled over constantly. According to the Treasury’s own data, the average maturity of marketable debt has fallen, and the share maturing within one year has increased substantially. This means that any systemic shock, policy, price, or otherwise, rapidly translates into liquidity stress. This shift renders the U.S. fiscal infrastructure sensitive to capital and to time. Recursive systems anchored in short-duration instruments cannot tolerate latency, they metabolize timing strain as financial deviation. Sociologist Lisa Adkins, writing on time and finance, describes how systems of governance increasingly operate by managing temporality itself: auction timing, interest rates, and rollover cycles become core levers of control.[cite:@adkins_TimeMoney_2018] When duration itself becomes a form of leverage, even small disruptions in timing, like the lag between procurement reactions and auction signals, can activate macroeconomic recalibrations. The tariff didn’t break the system. It misaligned its temporal contracts.

Anthropologist David Graeber argued that debt is a social and temporal ordering system—one that encodes power, obligation, and governance through time-based expectations.[cite:@graeber_Debt_2011] In this context, Treasury auctions are not neutral fiscal procedures, they are where the state’s operational capacity is re-evaluated in real time by its creditors. When tariffs introduced cost uncertainty, it wasn’t political messaging that failed. It was the bid curves.

Primary dealers and institutional buyers adjusted their participation based on forecasted cost. That adjustment appeared in softened bid coverage and upward pressure on yields. From inside the system, these weren’t interpreted as political judgments, they were deviation signals, activating defensive routines across agencies that rely on predictable auction performance.

This also aligns with Niklas Luhmann’s theory of self-referential systems. In The Economy as a Social System (1988), Luhmann argues that the economy is a closed system that processes only internally recognized information.[cite:@luhmann_WirtschaftGesellschaft_1988] The auction strain did not reflect beliefs about the tariffs. It reflected a divergence from expected operational rhythms, forcing the system to re-stabilize around a tolerable range.

Wendy Chun’s work in Updating to Remain the Same adds another relevant layer.[cite:@chun_UpdatingRemainSame_2016] She shows how modern systems don’t respond to events as such, they respond to the breakdown of synchronization. Control is exercised through the containment of timing failure. In this case, the Treasury auction models began slipping out of sync with the underlying assumptions used by procurement, fiscal policy, and monetary operations. That timing mismatch became visible as yield strain, and that strain became actionable.

The policy revision wasn’t a response to a discrete crisis. It was a correction triggered by feedback accumulation across liquidity-sensitive systems.

# The timeline was a dance of corrections From April 2 through April 9, the tariff policy passed through a sequence of inputs and adjustments, announcement, market response, procurement slowdown, Treasury auction shifts, policy revision. This can appear as a chain of causes and effects, but that framing misses the structure. These were not sequential decisions. They were concurrent feedback loops, each operating on different rhythms, each reacting to different thresholds of deviation.

Procurement systems began adjusting within 24 hours. Futures markets corrected in near real-time. Institutional buyers shifted Treasury auction behavior by day five. By the time narrative explanation began to consolidate, the policy had already been partially suspended. These weren’t coordinated moves. They were interdependent corrections occurring at different operational layers.

Each layer operated on its own temporal horizon. Financial systems responded in microseconds, rebalancing positions before policy statements even finished broadcasting. Procurement systems adjusted daily, updating cost models and delivery schedules by the close of each business cycle. Treasury auction behavior shifted over a matter of days, slowly accumulating strain before surfacing in yield curves. And interpretive systems, media, analysis, legislative narrative, arrives on a weekly cadence, only engaging once behavioral stabilization was already underway. These weren’t just asynchronous reactions. They were stacked timebases, each with a different tolerance for uncertainty, and each serving as a containment layer for the last.

Reiterative containment isn’t redundancy. It’s variation under constraint. When no surplus is available, no ideological slack, no material buffer, governance doesn't repeat itself accidentally. It iterates strategically within feedback tolerances. The system doesn’t rerun events. It reskins them. Each policy shock routes through a finite repertoire of stabilizing behaviors, generating difference that never threatens exit.

Cybernetician W. Ross Ashby formulated the Law of Requisite Variety: a system can only remain stable if it has enough internal complexity to match the complexity of its environment.[cite:@ashby_IntroductionCybernetics_1956] The tariff shock did not need to be anticipated; the system’s variety, procurement pause, debt spread, policy revision, was already distributed across multiple rhythms. The system didn’t reason its way to a correction. It routed through available behaviors until one matched. Heinz von Foerster, a second-order cybernetician, emphasized that observers are part of the system they describe—a framing that resonates with interpretive participation as a stabilizing function.[cite:@vonfoerster_ObservingSystems_1981]

This layered responsiveness reflects a principle visible in cybernetic theory since the work of Ross Ashby and Heinz von Foerster: systems maintain stability by distributing correction across feedback levels. The different rhythms, hourly in finance, daily in procurement, weekly in policy, are not noise. They’re how stability is produced without a central controller. Each part of the system detects and responds to divergence on its own timebase.

Platform governance theory helps clarify this behavior. Philosopher and design theorist Benjamin Bratton, in The Stack, describes platform governance as exception management—systems that don’t decide, but sort disruptions into routable cases.[cite:@bratton_Stack_2016] The platform doesn’t "decide" in the traditional sense. It routes. It flags. It isolates deviation and initiates modular responses. The adjustment that followed the tariff announcement wasn’t a coordinated retreat. It was exception management triggered by an input routed through existing control structures.

In platform terms, the tariff didn’t initiate a debate. It triggered an exception protocol. Bratton’s Stack model helps clarify this: platforms govern not by coherent strategy, but by automated sorting of disruptions into routable cases. The tariff functioned less as directive policy and more as an engagement object, a piece of content injected into system workflows, triggering cascades of moderation, filtering, and quarantine. What looked like institutional judgment was closer to platform moderation logic: detect deviation, isolate instability, suppress escalation, restore flow.

Policy, in this frame, becomes a kind of stimulus. Not an instruction, but a test of thresholds. When the system cannot absorb the cost of implementation, through logistics, liquidity, or latency, it doesn’t need to deliberate. It reroutes, suspends, or delays without resolving the contradiction. In this case, the tariff's cost entered the system faster than any single institution could buffer. The adjustments that followed didn’t emerge from consensus. They emerged from the recognition that continuity was more valuable than consistency.

The timeline of April 2 to April 9 wasn’t a progression. It was a synchronization effort, feedback loops re-aligning under stress to preserve throughput.

Interpretation closed the system's response loop

By April 9, the most disruptive components of the tariff policy had been suspended. Institutions had adjusted procurement schedules, market expectations had rebalanced, and debt issuance, though still under pressure, had returned to a more predictable range. Only then did formal interpretation begin, of the absence of an event: commentary from media outlets, analysis from economists, policy statements from agencies and lawmakers.

These explanations, about strategic recalibration, political misjudgment, or market discipline, were not irrelevant, but they were not explanatory in the causal sense. They functioned as narrative infrastructure: affective scaffolds that stabilized perception long enough for throughput to resume. Meaning is a system resource. They arrived after the system had already completed its behavioral adjustment. What they provided was narrative closure, the final stabilization layer required to render the correction legible.

Lauren Berlant describes interpretation as a form of affective infrastructure. Discourse doesn’t resolve contradiction; it manages its persistence. Public analysis of the tariff cycle didn’t clarify what had happened. It provided narrative containers that allowed the system’s outputs, market correction, policy shift, debt adjustment, to appear coherent after the fact. That appearance is essential to maintaining institutional legitimacy, even if no decision-making subject was in control.

This also reflects core insights from Luhmann’s The Reality of the Mass Media (1996), in which he argues that communication systems don’t convey truth.[cite:@luhmann_RealityMassMedia_2000] They reproduce structure. Media, in his framework, doesn’t report reality, it generates it recursively. The explosion of analysis after April 9 was not a breakdown into opinion. It was a convergence into routable signal. Each explanation adds interpretive density. That density stabilizes perception, allowing systems, financial, political, platformic, to proceed as though coherence had been maintained throughout.

This is functional closure. Interpretation acts as an interface layer: not explaining the event, but ensuring that no event is allowed to form outside system legibility. Physicist and feminist theorist Karen Barad coined the term “intra-action” to describe how agency doesn’t precede relation—it emerges from it.[cite:@barad_MeetingUniverseHalfway_2007] In recursive systems, meaning doesn’t originate—it materializes through synchronization. Agency, in her framework, doesn’t belong to subjects, it emerges from the relations that materialize reality. The recursive loop completes not when the system understands itself, but when it prevents anything from happening that cannot already be rendered operable. Narrative isn’t a mirror. It’s a firewall.

Media scholar Tarleton Gillespie, in Custodians of the Internet, shows how platforms maintain flow by routing engagement.[cite:@gillespie_CustodiansInternet_2018] Signal value, not accuracy, is what determines what circulates. In this context, interpretation functions less as a diagnostic and more as telemetry. It provides data about participation and alignment, not clarity about cause.

But interpretation doesn’t just stabilize systems. It stabilizes subjects. Cybernetic governance does not need the public to understand events. It needs publics to metabolize them, visibly, vocally, in sync. To remain intelligible within the loop is to signal credibility. To resist interpretation, to withdraw from the labor of coherence, is to risk incoherence as a social position.

Burnout becomes proof-of-work. The more interpretation you produce, the more your signal is routed as legitimate. This is not a side effect. It is the system’s affective economy: the explanatory strain itself becomes a currency of trust.

The implication is stark: the system doesn’t need interpretation to understand itself. It needs interpretation to continue. The moment explanation begins, it converts volatility into content, and content into feedback. This doesn’t resolve the event. It closes the loop.

But feedback isn't free. Each cybernetic correction, each buffering maneuver, consumes interpretive, computational, financial, and temporal energy. Chun’s notion of synchronization failure gains added weight when considered materially: the cost of preserving system rhythm rises as buffers thin. What we call “stability” is increasingly a product of burn rate, how fast systems can process misalignment into throughput without overheating. The tariff cycle didn’t cause a structural collapse, but it spiked the system’s metabolic rate. Stability was preserved, but at the cost of acceleration elsewhere.

Curiosity is the final input; interpretation as metabolic load

Interpretation arrives to stabilize the event's outputs. That interpretive labor is the event cycle's terminal phase. To say that interpretation “completes the loop” is to indicate the opening of a new process: recursive energy capture through sensemaking.

This labor is conscriptive. It doesn’t ask for voluntary insight, it demands temporal alignment. Governance without surplus has no patience for slow subjects. Meaning must be generated at platform speed, or it fails to register as stabilizing behavior. In that sense, publics don’t respond to governance. They function as its distributed latency buffers.

This is not symbolic. It is infrastructural.

Once behavioral stabilization is underway, procurement rerouted, Treasury auctions cleared, policy revised, what remains volatile is meaning. And meaning, in contemporary systems of governance and platform economics, is not managed by authorities. It is distributed across interpretive agents: institutions, analysts, publics, commentators, markets. The effort to understand, to locate cause, assign intention, reimpose coherence, functions as a cybernetic pressure sink. It doesn’t resolve instability. It absorbs it.

The process is recursive because the effort to explain doesn’t just circulate in discourse. It produces system-readable signals: sentiment data, engagement rates, risk models, volatility indexes, alignment metrics. Curiosity becomes throughput, measurable and actionable. The system registers how much explanatory behavior is occurring, and in what direction.

This includes me.

This piece didn’t escape the loop, it executed it. I took the signal, policy strain, procurement deferral, auction softening, and turned them into narrative form. Constraint into coherence. Stress into syntax. By drafting this, citing this, threading this, I didn’t stand outside the system. I fed it.

And now you are too.

Reading, interpreting, weighing reference density against rhetorical cadence, you’re consuming thought and measuring and modulating its signal. If you like it, share it, quote it, subscribe to it, you are audience and affective computer. You’re a stabilizer. A throughput node. And if you’re a paying subscriber? Then yes, you’re financing the production of narrative surplus. You’re underwriting the very process of converting volatility into system-readable coherence. You’re metabolizing meaning and funding the burn.

That’s not failure. That’s format. The loop completes when you feel it.

This is what Wendy Chun frames in Updating to Remain the Same: interpretation is one of system maintenance's key temporal instruments.[cite:@chun_UpdatingRemainSame_2016] “Understanding” functions as a synchronization technique, aligning users with system time by converting confusion into stabilized participation.

This alignment is not free.

Every act of interpretation, whether technical, economic, or narrative, draws from limited cognitive, temporal, and material resources. In Cruel Optimism, Berlant describes how affective labor under late capitalism increasingly takes the form of interpretive endurance: the ongoing attempt to “make sense” of conditions that do not change.[cite:@berlant_CruelOptimism_2011] The cost of this labor is psychic and infrastructural. Time spent interpreting policy noise is time not spent on logistical support, survival strategies, or relational maintenance.

The system does not require accurate interpretation. It only requires signal-dense interpretation, enough narrative coherence to close the feedback loop and stabilize expectations. In this sense, interpretation becomes a form of consumptive delay: metabolic suspension.

Luhmann’s The Reality of the Mass Media clarifies this further: communication systems do not convey truth.[cite:@luhmann_RealityMassMedia_2000] They generate recursive readability. That readability is judged by whether it produces more communication. The more an event resists easy explanation, the more interpretive cycles it produces. And the more cycles, the more legibility the system has to route into behavioral analytics.

In this way, curiosity becomes a systemic resource because it produces participation. The attempt to understand becomes surplus labor routed back into systemic continuity. It is metabolizing. Under cognitive capitalism, curiosity is both commodity and exhaust. Interpretation doesn’t delay collapse, it feeds the burn. What persists isn’t clarity. It’s signal.

This is the closing efficiency of cybernetic governance: it does not suppress confusion. It formats it.

Explanatory behavior, threads, op-eds, briefings, critiques, is not friction to the system. It is a thermodynamic feature: a way of converting signal instability into engagement heat, which can then be measured, traded, and predicted against.

Benjamin Bratton’s The Stack shows how platforms govern by processing exception as workflow.[cite:@bratton_Stack_2016] Curiosity functions similarly. It routes exception through interpretive modules: economic analysis, geopolitical commentary, behavioral modeling, public discourse. Each one completes a circuit.

Each one adds load to a system that no longer distinguishes between signal and sense, only between signal and failure-to-process. But that load is not friction to be overcome. It is constitutive. The system needs it. The reiterative management of interpretive strain is not an accidental byproduct of cybernetic governance. It is cybernetic governance.

The load is the system.

And so the system reroutes energy toward the load. Not as an exception. As protocol.

Because the interpretive load is the structure through which the system persists. When explanatory behavior begins producing recursive throughput, signal in excess of signal, the system reorganizes to support that production. To metabolize it.

Philosopher Georges Bataille, in The Accursed Share, argued that surplus energy must be expended.[cite:@bataille_AccursedShare_1988] In capitalism, this often takes the form of symbolic or interpretive burn: energy spent without direct material return, but necessary to maintain order. Value is demonstrated through nonproductive burn: ritual, war, spectacle. In cybernetic capitalism, explanatory strain replaces the sacrificial economy. What must be burned now is sense-making itself, understood as ongoing labor in the face of contradiction.

This is why the system draws on every available resource, financial, military, psychological, to maintain the feedback circuit. Because it demonstrates capacity. The ability to process confusion becomes the proof of viability.

Elizabeth Povinelli’s concept of endurance clarifies this further. In Economies of Abandonment, she argues that late liberal systems no longer promise resolution.[cite:@povinelli_EconomiesAbandonment_2011] What they demand instead is the performance of ongoing survival under conditions that do not change. Explanatory behavior becomes part of that performance: an effort to remain intelligible within the loop.

Media theorist Franco “Bifo” Berardi argues that under cognitive capitalism, attention becomes both commodity and exhaust: burnout is a proof of yield.[cite:@berardi_SoulWork_2009] The labor of trying to understand, of staying alert to contradiction, volatility, and interpretive overload, is the fuel that sustains the apparatus. The burnout it generates is not failure. It is yield.

So when the system redirects energy, via Treasury auctions, platform algorithms, crisis deployment, neural loops, it is not responding to instability. It is harvesting it.

And it harvests differential strain. The subject who endures interpretive pressure becomes more signal-rich, more visible to governance. The organic intellectual becomes a class of material, and their burnout is no longer dysfunction, it’s credentialed intensity.

The interpretive strain itself becomes a site of productivity, and confusion becomes the condition for value extraction.

Conclusion: The system didn't "reverse policy," it stabilized feedback

The tariff policy released on April 2nd did not fail because it was politically unpopular, economically incoherent, or ideologically contested, though all of those framings circulated after the fact. It failed because it introduced costs and risks into a system already operating near the edge of its tolerances. The result was not collapse. It was correction.

Each part of the system, procurement, logistics, futures pricing, bond markets, policy coordination, responded to a deviation processed as signal. That signal triggered recursive adjustment: models shifted, orders paused, yields climbed, auction participation softened. Eventually, the policy was partially suspended by cumulative constraint recognition. The system rerouted itself to preserve throughput.

This process aligns with established systems theory. Deviation is sensed, thresholds are crossed, behavior corrects. Comprehension is not required. Only continuation. As Luhmann shows, complex systems operate through operational closure: they respond to disturbances they can already process. Beer’s Viable System Model emphasizes the same: viability is reorganization fast enough to remain legible to itself. Chun and Berlant remind us that delay and interpretation are techniques of endurance under ongoing systemic stress.

Interpretation, once it begins, completes the deviation's return to homeostasis. It retroactively casts coherence across a managed instability and renders the adjustment processable as narrative. In this sense, interpretation is the final stabilizing behavior of correction, a feedback mechanism that routes public attention, institutional discourse, and political meaning into continuity.

The tariff sequence wasn’t a misstep or a crisis. It was a quasi-event: a disturbance contained before it could breach the system’s representational horizon. Not resolved. Processed.

The proof is in the interpretive heat trail it left. Each tweet, analysis, op-ed, and institutional adjustment stabilized perception and added to the burn rate that validates recursive governance. You witness these cycles and are drafted into them. If you’re interpreting, you’re syncing. If you’re syncing, you’re contributing load.

And the system’s behavior wasn’t incoherence. It was a synchronized pressure response from a structure with no remaining slack. That’s not a breakdown in governance. It’s governance after surplus, when every signal costs, and meaning itself becomes a resource to be burned.