Engineering Anti-Capture Governance, Power Provenance, and Graceful Degradation in Socio-Technical Systems

Large institutions are often described as if “the system” were an autonomous actor. That language can conceal responsibility. Socio-technical systems are produced and maintained by people, laws, budgets, contracts, software, norms, administrative routines, and historical path dependence; harmful outcomes can therefore arise without a single central mastermind, while specific actors may still knowingly exploit or preserve harmful arrangements. This paper proposes a governance engineering framework for making consequential power traceable, bounded, interruptible, and boring when it fails. Building on the Commons Initiative corpus, Elinor Ostrom’s empirical work on durable self-governance, Nancy Leveson’s systems-theoretic safety approach, and NIST cyber-resilience engineering, the paper defines four proposed metrics: Maximum Malicious Reach (MMR), Minimum Defensive Burden (MDB), Defensive Interruption Burden (DIB), and an Irreversible-Harm Interruption Inequality. The objective is not a perfect society. It is a civilization architecture in which unilateral defection cannot easily cascade into irreversible system-wide harm.

Keywords: socio-technical systems, governance engineering, anti-capture, graceful degradation, polycentric governance, power provenance, Commons Initiative, system safety, resilience