The Anti-Capture Architecture in Detail

The surest way to become the power you feared is to build the cure as a throne.

— The Coherence Thesis, Vol. III

Every institution that has ever been captured was, at the moment of its founding, designed to resist capture. The design was insufficient. This chapter attempts to do better.

Volume III established anti-capture as a constitutional principle. It named the general categories of capture risk — political capture, corporate capture, charismatic capture, ideological capture, financial capture, technological capture — and identified the constitutional commitment to designing against each of them. What Volume III did not do, appropriately, was specify the mechanisms. That specification is this chapter's purpose.

This is the most technically demanding chapter in the governance section, because the mechanisms must be specific enough to be genuinely constraining and general enough to apply across the variety of contexts in which Providence communities will operate. The chapter proceeds through each major capture risk, examines the specific mechanism through which the capture operates, and proposes specific institutional design responses. The proposed designs are not final. They are the best current judgments, informed by the historical record of analogous institutions and by the constitutional principles established in Volume III. They will need to be refined through the experience of the founding community and through the governance experiments of the communities that follow it.