Concept
The structural counter to Ch 10’s out-competition mechanism. Institutional carriers cannot survive if they have to clear a free-engagement market — they have to compete with platforms’ zero-marginal-cost attention and lose. The only survivable funding shapes are those whose revenue is not a function of how well the institution clears the attention market: endowments and patient capital, public funding through credibly neutral allocation, member dues and mission-driven subscriptions, public-goods funding mechanisms (retroactive funding, quadratic funding, crypto-economic public-goods primitives). Revenue contracted in a different market than the engagement-optimization noise lets the institution lose the engagement-market clearing entirely without losing capacity to operate. The first of Ch 12’s three load-bearing design principles.
Connections
- Defined in: Infrastructure for Integration
- Discussed in: Ch 12 — Infrastructure for Integration, Ch 10 — Political Economy of Attention
This is a graph landing page. Use the local graph and backlinks (right) to explore, or open the interactive ontology.