Registration Regime Theory: How Power Endures Through Time A Conceptual Framework for Writing, Numbers, Money, and Code as Temporal Technologies of Rule

This article presents Registration Regime Theory, a conceptual framework that 
explains the endurance of power through time by foregrounding the infrastructures 
of record-making and registration. Classic accounts of historical continuity often 
privilege a triad of forces—military coercion, economic organization, and ideological 
legitimacy. Registration Regime Theory does not deny these dimensions, but argues 
that they do not, on their own, explain why claims (property, debt, status, 
entitlement) remain binding across generations, why institutions outlive founders, or 
why inequality can persist even as regimes, markets, and belief systems mutate. 
The framework proposes a fourth dimension: registration power—the capacity to 
detach claims from mortal bodies and embed them into durable, transferable, 
enforceable records that stabilize social order over time. The article traces an 
evolutionary sequence of registration forms—writing, numbers, money, and 
code—and argues that contemporary algorithmic systems intensify registration by 
converting archival traces into automated decisions that pre-allocate opportunities 
and waiting times. The theory contributes to interdisciplinary debates in social 
theory, political philosophy, media theory, and digital governance by re-centering 
archives, documentation, and computational classification as primary mechanisms 
of structural continuity.