A Constitutional Specification for the First Application

The will can compose itself. The body beneath it keeps telling the truth.

Adapted from The Coherence Thesis, Volume III

A piece of technology is not what it does. It is what it refuses to do. The refusals are the constitution.

This chapter is a constitutional document for a piece of technology. Not a product roadmap, not a feature specification, not a market analysis. A specification of what the first version of the Providence application would be, stated with enough precision to constrain the people who build it and to allow the people who use it to evaluate whether what was built is what was specified. The requirements describe a proposed first version. They do not establish that these controls have been implemented or tested.

The specification has this character because a product specification that describes capabilities without constitutional constraints would produce a piece of technology whose character is determined by the priorities of its builders, funders, or vendors rather than by the constitutional principles of the institution it serves. Volume III's entire analysis of how technology shapes consciousness, how the infrastructure people live inside determines what they come to find natural, desirable, and worth pursuing, establishes why this is unacceptable. The Providence application is not a neutral tool. It is an environment. Its character will shape the character of the communities that inhabit it. That character must be constitutionally determined.