Why it was a question
The owner proposed it at U9 as the thesis frame, after the assistant’s first proposals treated distributed agency as three rival pictures of the whole. It held the work together through the organizational-affect line: corporate “sensory organs”, immune-like incident response, compartmentalized access.
Why it was reframed
By the manuscript outline of 2026-10-04 evening the question had split. What a collective is became a supposition rather than a result (CLAIM-080), and what the paper could answer was narrower: given an agent, what organizes which of its regimes acts (QUESTION-015). The original question is kept here because CASE-014 was committed to it, and that commitment outlived it.