Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Social ontology — what social facts, groups, institutions and social kinds are, and what makes them exist — collective intentionality, joint commitment, status functions, convention, social construction, and whether groups can be agents or minds (group: philosophy; ADR-017).
29 of 191 CASE documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| CASE-006 | Open Horizon | A fictional cooperative founded for openness and public benefit whose sustaining mechanisms come to outweigh its mission as it grows (A31): persistence through turnover with the founding intentions lost. | Active |
| CASE-007 | CoreWeave: a climate-concerned workforce building fossil-powered datacenters | The owner’s case at U13: employees largely concerned about climate, a company whose datacenters, sited where energy is cheap, induce fossil fuel demand. Replaced by the fictional CASE-025 at the owner’s suggestion (U15). | Superseded — by CASE-025 |
| CASE-014 v2 | Microsoft, as the philosophical target | The real corporation the first framing asked about. Committed to as a recurring touchstone (A205) and then silently dropped from the drafts; retired here by status rather than left as a promise nobody kept. | Deferred |
| CASE-025 | Verdant Compute | A fictional compute company whose decarbonization-minded workforce operates an organization whose market position drives fossil-fuel demand (A31). Shows the whole’s operative direction diverging from the average of its members’ intentions. | Active |
| CASE-028 | Stability AI: well-intentioned founders, near-total churn, generic successor | The owner’s case at U12: a company founded by researchers and open-source developers that churned almost its whole staff in a year and became a generic corporate entity. Replaced by the fictional CASE-006. | Superseded — by CASE-006 |
| CASE-050 | The all-hands: a corporate event as a synchronization mechanism for the firm | The owner’s case (2026-10-11): a company all-hands or offsite as a mechanism that synchronizes a “corporate entity”, a kind of self. The teams’ priorities have drifted apart, and the event re-couples them. It is the firm-scale counterpart of the session’s individual routes: entrainment by co-presence, a record written for later readers, and incentives realigned. Whether the firm so synchronized is a self is the open question, not something the case settles. | Active |
| CASE-060 | Two identical unnumbered ballots in one tally: two votes that no relation in the structure of the vote tells apart | Constructed: two voters each put a single cross for the same candidate on identical, unnumbered ballot papers in one box, and both are counted. Within the relations that make a paper a vote, each bears the same relations to everything and none to the other, so they are not even weakly discernible, yet the count is two. Anchored on a documented norm that voids any paper marked so that the voter can be identified (UK RPA 1983, Sch. 1, r. 47(1)(c)). It forces the choice between CLAIM-136’s strict and weak versions, and bears on CLAIM-138. | Active |
| CASE-061 v2 | Wonder-working power: one hymn phrase in a national address, heard as faith by those who sing it and as boilerplate by others | In the State of the Union of 28 January 2003 George W. Bush said “there’s power, wonder-working power, in the goodness and idealism and faith of the American people”, lifting the refrain of an 1899 gospel hymn verbatim. Churchgoers who knew the hymn heard the power of Christ; others heard boilerplate; an experiment with an ingroup and a religiously diverse outgroup measured the split. The same-wording variant of CASE-064, illustrating CLAIM-224 without translation. | Active |
| CASE-064 | Lindsey Stone’s Arlington photograph: one post, taken by friends as a tasteless in-joke and by strangers as contempt | In 2012 Lindsey Stone posed at Arlington National Cemetery mock-shouting and giving the finger beside a “Silence And Respect” sign, part of a running joke of photos that disobeyed signs. Friends who knew the joke called it tasteless; four weeks later strangers read the same post as contempt for the war dead, and she lost her job. A change of audience with no translation and the token unchanged, illustrating CLAIM-224. Partial: the token is a photograph, not wording. | Active |
| CASE-069 v2 | Labov’s recorded sounding sessions: ritual insult turning personal, with the same exchange shape and a different act | Labov’s team taped sounding among Harlem peer groups. Boot answers David’s taunt with a remark “related to A-5 in exactly the way that one sound is related to another”, yet both are taken as personal insults: denied, objected to, wept over. Labov’s rule puts the difference in a further relation, the shared knowledge before an audience that the proposition is untrue. A documented, non-institutional case for CLAIM-151 in which the act follows a relation among the parties, and for CLAIM-138, since the exchange relations alone match and the acts still differ. | Active |
| CASE-073 | The Kia Provo: one concept-car name, a blank coinage to the motor press and taken as honouring the IRA in Northern Ireland | In March 2013 Kia showed a concept car at Geneva named the Provo, “from the word ‘provoke’”. The motor press found no meaning in the name; in Northern Ireland, where “Provo” names a member of the Provisional IRA, six MPs said it “has caused deep offence”. Kia said it meant no offence, and withdrew the name for the UK and Ireland. One name, the speaker’s intention fixed and declared, a new audience, and an unintended reading taken up and acted on: the accidental, verbal variant of CASE-064, illustrating CLAIM-224. | Active |
| CASE-077 | The reciprocal pair: two processes that endorse only each other under recursive delegation, so that each one’s authority returns to it through the other | A2 §5’s counterexample to the ban on self-endorsement: “Suppose D1 endorses D2, and D2 endorses D1.” Under g = (1 − η)b + ηEᵀg, each operator’s authority comes partly from its own endorsement returned after two hops. It came back in A6 as authority that “may circulate”. Used to show that a ban on self-endorsement does not make authority independent of one’s own endorsements. | Active |
| CASE-079 | r/place: a shared pixel canvas on which each Reddit user could place one pixel at a time under a cooldown, and communities coordinated off the canvas to build, defend and overwrite images | The owner proposed it at U8 of the 2026-10-13 exchange: “every user can modify a single pixel once, and different subreddits coordinated to present certain images or even warred amongst each other over regions of the canvas”. Reddit ran it in 2017, 2022 and 2023, and released the 2022 placement log. A8 read it as the exchange’s two canvases made visible: the pixels as the meaning canvas, the plans, templates and alliances off the canvas as the influence canvas. First time the thing turns up in the record. The event and the data are documented. The readings of them are proposals. | Active |
| CASE-080 | The skeptic who delegates: a critic that cannot overturn an emerging consensus gives its authority to a process that can generate alternatives | A3 §6’s worked example. Four processes: an integrator and a decision- maker push toward a decision, a skeptic disagrees, and a generator can translate neglected evidence into new hypotheses. The skeptic does not try to win. It endorses the generator, whose hypotheses change the decision landscape. Used to show delegation as a route to one’s goals, and dissent made useful by a role. | Active |
| CASE-098 v2 | A long rivalry between two teams outlives every player, owner and supporter who first carried it: new fans inherit the antagonism, its history and its practices before they know why the game matters | From U2 of the exchange of 2026-10-16 on sports fandom (the owner’s list of subcases). A2’s reading: a mature rivalry is “a reproduced intercollective relation”, carried by families, media and fan culture, that can survive the replacement of everyone on both sides. Stipulated: the record has no study of a particular rivalry. It shows a relation with its own continuity; it does not show that the relation is a system, an agent, or constitutive of either fandom. | Active |
| CASE-100 v2 | A fan redub of an X-Men cartoon, circulated online in 2006, put “I’m the Juggernaut, bitch!” into X-Men: The Last Stand three months later | The owner’s case at U7 of the exchange of 2026-10-16, offered as a fandom “making something happen”. Two fans made the parody; many people spread it for their own reasons; the film’s makers put its line in at a reshoot. A7: an effect on an outside institution with no collective intention and no procedure behind it. Documented as to the sequence; the route by which the parody reached the decision, and whether the spreaders were X-Men fans or the internet at large, is not. | Active |
| CASE-102 v2 | A college program stays good, or bad, at a sport for decades while its whole roster turns over every four or five years | The owner’s case, U3 of the exchange of 2026-10-16: “the team composition experiences extremely fast churn, and yet in spite of this real world ship-of-theseus situation, teams often maintain standing on similar timescales as professional teams (if not longer)”. A3: it separates the persistence of a collective’s identity from the persistence of its capacities, and the second needs a mechanism that regenerates them in each new population. Stipulated: the record holds no data on program persistence. The proposed test is residual persistence of performance across seasons with no player overlap. | Active |
| CASE-103 v2 | A fanbase keeps a reputation, for hostility or loyalty or knowledge, after the behaviour that earned it has changed, and outsiders and members both act on it | From U2 of the exchange of 2026-10-16. A2 separated three things that vary independently: many members have the trait; others believe the fanbase has it; that belief shapes how the fanbase behaves. A reputation belongs to a fanbase through its relations with audiences, and it can enter the process that produces its own evidence. It is a case for regulative attribution (THEORY-137, QUESTION-049) beyond mental states. Stipulated; it shows no particular reputation was self-fulfilling. | Active |
| CASE-104 | A fanbase is said to hate its owner or general manager, though it has no procedure for forming a view, some fans approve of the person, and nobody has counted | From U2 of the exchange of 2026-10-16. A2 separated four things the sentence could report: a statistical aggregate of dislike, a shared emotional orientation, a norm of opposition that a loyal fan is expected to meet, and a corporate judgment such as a supporters’ trust demanding resignation. A fanbase can have the second and third without the fourth, and a vocal minority can set a public stance most members privately reject. The case for QUESTION-119. Stipulated. | Active |
| CASE-105 | The Washington Senators: the original club became the Minnesota Twins in 1961, an expansion club took its name in Washington and became the Texas Rangers in 1972, and the Montreal Expos became the Washington Nationals in 2005, so franchise, city and supporters each have a different successor | The owner’s subcase at U2 of the exchange of 2026-10-16, “the team formerly known as the washington senators”. A2 corrected the framing: the name belonged to two franchises, and the city’s present team descends from a third. A league can designate the successor franchise; it cannot designate the successor fandom. The lineages are documented; how supporters actually distributed their loyalties is not, and the case does not show that a fandom’s identity branched. | Active |
| CASE-145 v2 | Perspective without collective agency: populations given the same structured norms, categories or interpretive training, some interacting and some acquiring similar dispositions independently, with and without any mechanism for collective decision or coordinated intervention | Proposed at A4 of the exchange of 2026-10-23, “Framework Overview Request”, which called it “the most philosophically important new experiment”. It asks whether a distributed organizational perspective can be identified without attributing a further collective agent, CLAIM-418’s separation tested, and bears on QUESTION-260. A4’s condition: it helps only if it says in advance what distinguishes a shared perspective from correlated responses or learned norms. Not run. | Active |
| CASE-148 | Perspective transplantation: two populations matched in behaviour exchange different combinations of learned interpretive rules, specialist parameters, training histories, institutional rules and shared memory, and are then set where the transferred parts disagree with their new surroundings | Proposed at A4 of the exchange of 2026-10-23, “Framework Overview Request”, as an extension of CASE-101. It asks which components carry a perspective’s characteristic organization when it moves between carriers: CLAIM-417’s realization, character and lineage, tested by transfer. A4: “No transfer experiment can settle numerical identity merely by demonstrating causal continuity.” Not run. | Active |
| CASE-151 | Wells Fargo’s Community Bank, 2002–2016: unauthorized and unwanted accounts that the board’s own investigation traced to the sales model, the performance management that enforced it and a decentralized structure, while signals of the harm reached people who could not act on them | The Wells Fargo sales-practices episode, as reported by the bank’s independent directors (2017; LIT-1425, read in NOTE-1095). The report finds the root cause in the Community Bank’s sales culture and performance management, sustained by a decentralized structure that deferred to the business line. It finds that leadership blamed individual employees, and that the signals of harm were held by investigators, regional leaders and control functions without authority to act, or filtered before reaching the board. It also names and sanctions individuals. Not shown: intent, the absence of individual culpability, or anything beyond the company’s own account of itself. | Active |
| CASE-166 | Northstar as a multilevel simulation: twelve employees with fixed frames in four departments form overlapping working groups that keep records and can receive delegated authority; as reported, a working group with delegated authority ties a conventional router given the same information and authority, nearly all of its advantage over departmental silos comes from fast authorization, and keeping the incident team’s records through a commander handoff improves the company’s estimate of its own state about eightfold while barely changing what it does | The owner’s idea at T18 of the exchange “Experimental Infrastructure Review”: “maybe employees are “pre-perspectives” or sub-perspectives, which can reorganize amongst themselves to form the perspectives that influence the higher level organizational behavior”. T19 designed it and T20 reported running it as “PerspectiveLab v2.11 — Northstar”. It is Northstar (CASE-023) with CASE-134’s handoff as one arm, and it adds the contrast CASE-134 lacks: the team’s records kept or erased. The page carries no files and the lab holds no v2.10 or v2.11, so every number is reported, not reproduced. Not shown: that any organizational perspective emerged, which T20 itself denies. | Proposed |
| CASE-169 v3 | The Chagossians, 1965 to now: a people expelled from the Chagos Archipelago between 1967 and 1973 for the Diego Garcia base, dispersed to Mauritius, the Seychelles and Britain, whose practices, kinship and political organization continued or arose in exile while sovereignty over the islands was settled between states | The owner’s case, U1–U3 of the exchange of 2026-10-26, “About the Chagossians”. Britain separated the archipelago from Mauritius in 1965, expelled its inhabitants by 1973 for a US base on Diego Garcia, and the islanders’ descendants live dispersed across three countries. The ICJ advised in 2019 that decolonization was incomplete; a UK–Mauritius treaty of 2025 would cede sovereignty and keep the base. A case in which territorial community, cultural transmission, political agency and the claims of the displaced, ordinarily bundled, were pulled apart by identifiable decisions. Not shown: that the Chagossians are one persisting agent, or which practices survived; the sources are registered unread. | Active |
| CASE-172 v2 | Federal science and education in the United States, 2025–2026: grants cancelled, frozen and in part reinstated, staff departures, advisory committees ended and research programs suspended, so that funding, organization and scientific capacity could be restored, or not, separately | The owner’s case, U4 of the exchange of 2026-10-26: “the full breadth of the harms incurred by the actions of the DOGE project, and the trump administration’s broader assault on the scientific research and education establishment”. A4 drew ten dimensions of harm and the question it took as central: “Suppose a grant is canceled and later reinstated. What, precisely, has been restored?” A case of a resource restored without the organization it supported, and of capacity lost without output falling. Not shown: the size of any loss. Every figure is the exchange’s, from reports this filing has not read. | Active |
| CASE-175 v3 | CECOT, 2025: people removed from the United States into Salvadoran custody despite court orders, the US saying it could not bring them back and El Salvador’s president that he could not send them, until coordinated transfers out showed the two governments together could | The owner’s case, U7 of the exchange of 2026-10-26: “the DOJ ignoring court orders not to deport people to CECOT, then claiming they didn’t have the authority to bring them back, while CECOT claimed they didn’t have the authority to send them back”. Physical custody, the control that selected and could release, and the duty to correct were held in different places, and each government’s statement of what it alone could not do was offered as if it settled what could be done. Not shown: whether any official was in contempt, or intent; the later proceedings are the exchange’s. | Active |
| CASE-176 v2 | The United States Institute of Peace, 2025–2026: its board removed and its building entered by DOGE staff with police assistance before any court ruled, nearly all staff dismissed, a district court’s judgment that the takeover was unlawful stayed on appeal, and the institution renamed while its legal identity continued | The owner’s case, U5 and U6 of the exchange of 2026-10-26: “examine the case of the US Institute for Peace through the lens of our framework”, then “the involvement of the DC metropolitan police and FBI, and the judge’s concern regarding the potential for police instigated violence in their ruling on whether or not to grant a TRO”. Name, building and legal entity continued; staff, programs, leadership and partner relations did not. And enforcement settled who held the building before any court settled who held the authority. Not shown: what was lost for good, or the legal outcome, which is pending. | Active |
| CASE-182 | Two operators under one update rule, endorsement moving toward observed outcomes: scored every round, the more accurate one holds the lead durably whatever the start; scored only when it acts, under sharp selection, whichever gained influence early keeps it | Filed by the fourth status review (ADR-057) for CLAIM-277, whose two loops the record had stated and not constructed. Two operators share one rule, with accuracies 0.8 and 0.6. Each round one acts, chosen with probability softmax(β·E), and endorsement moves toward observed outcomes, E ← E + η(outcome − E). Nothing marks either one as an authority. Scored every round, the more accurate one ends more endorsed in 200 of 200 seeds, even after a head start for the other (E0 = 0.3 against 0.9). With η = 0.01 the lead never changes hands in the second half. Scored only when it acts, with that same head start, the worse one is never displaced in 200 of 200 seeds at β = 30 or 100. At β = 8 the better one recovers, after a median of 460 rounds. The scored control at β = 100 entrenches no one. Code: scratch/formal/trust_loop.py. | Active |