The Canonical Stack.
The pieces are connected; they are not interchangeable. Public readers, scholars, and operators each tend to collapse the layers into the one they are closest to. The stack is the map that prevents that collapse — every layer named, with its role and the scope it actually covers.
Digital Gravity is the public framework. Relational Trust Infrastructure is the research program. KTP is one operational protocol derived from that work. Tamed Autonomy is an applied AI-governance implementation surface. The pieces are connected, but they are not interchangeable.
§01the layers
Digital Gravity
The public-facing framework: essays, motifs, and the core diagnoses that give the work its common vocabulary — gravity, substrate, the physics of trust.
Relational Trust Infrastructure
The research program that derives the framework's physics: trust as load-bearing relational infrastructure, built through cost, witness, reciprocity, and repair across time.
Trust Force Equation
The model of how trust is built between two parties — capacity, cost of signal, four-dimensional presence, asymmetric reciprocity, horizon, betrayal load. Currently a theoretical model; empirical testing underway.
Ostrom-Percolation
Paper 1. Reads Ostrom's eight design principles as maintenance functions on a percolating trust network. A research hypothesis with simulation support; empirical work pending.
Reconciliation Dynamics
How damage is metabolized after the fact. Forgiveness ratio, metabolic rate of repair, the asymmetry between betrayal and reconciliation. Independent convergence from primatology and indigenous practice.
KTP — Kinetic Trust Protocol
An operational protocol for computed trust and earned autonomy. Scores actions and trajectories under constraints, with appeal, expiration, repair, and auditability. Twenty-seven RFCs on GitHub.
Tamed Autonomy
An applied AI-agent governance surface that uses KTP as the computed-trust layer. The implementation register where the protocol meets running systems.
The visual register for the same information lives at /research/cartography — the graph as terrain, with the same layers as ridges and watersheds.