Reader & power
[v0.2]“I”, “we”, “you” and “they” do not merely identify voices. They allocate membership, burden, ownership and agency. A page may constitute its reader as witness, claimant, constituent, data subject, collaborator, customer or consenting party — and those roles carry different rights.
Five positions to name
01
Speaker
Who authorises the address?
Author, institution, coalition, machine or composite voice.
02
Addressee
Who is being recruited?
Reader, claimant, constituent, customer, witness or decision-maker.
03
Represented subject
Who is spoken about?
Person, community, living system, future generation or absent actor.
04
Consequence holder
Who carries what follows?
Benefits, burdens, liabilities, loss of option space and duties of repair.
05
Institutional actor
Who can select, classify, record, decide or remedy?
Curator, ontology owner, data holder, authority, duty-bearer, reviewer and enforcer.
The political checksum
Every composition should disclose all six. If one cannot be answered, the composition is not ready.
Address hazards
Direct address
Recruitment is an act
"Are you?" invites; "your" asserts relation; "we" may create solidarity — or annex the reader.
Absent agent
Opacity must be typed
Unknown, contested, withheld or out of scope are different epistemic conditions.
Interface power
The action allocates agency
Defaults, refusal, time, record and remedy are part of the communication.
The passive-voice burden audit
“May have been used” is epistemically cautious, but the acting party disappears. Opacity must be typed — and the last of these four is a defect, not a label to ship.
The evidence does not yet identify who acted.
Competing accounts assign responsibility differently.
An institution possesses but does not disclose attribution.
The grammar displaces responsibility onto the affected person.
The decision object
The Decision licence begins whenever a reader can consent, submit, disclose, waive, authorise, pay, enrol or allocate. At that boundary, rhetoric yields to agency and every field below must be exposed.
Actor / capacity
Who acts, and in what capacity.
Authority / mandate
Mandate reference, scope and expiry.
Decision basis
Policy, evidence bundle and reasoning-lineage version.
Prior state
What is true before the transition.
Requested transition
The exact action being asked for.
Resulting state
What becomes true, and what does not.
Data / purpose / recipients
What is collected, why, and who may access it.
Duration / reversibility
Retention, withdrawal window and thresholds.
Alternatives / refusal
Leave, defer, save or revise — at equal reach.
Review / receipt
Preview before action; durable timestamped record.
Appeal / remedy
Correction, withdrawal, deletion or escalation.
Owner / correction
Named steward and versioned correction route.
Consent at the point of state change
Name the state change and authority.
Separate navigation from assent. If choice is compulsory, name the governing authority instead of calling it consent.
Disclose consequence before action.
No preselection or inferred assent; direct address states who speaks, why, and what happens next.
Preserve refusal and revision parity.
Refusal cannot require more travel, disclosure, steps or cognitive work than acceptance.
Make remedy operational.
Review, record, expiry, withdrawal, correction and appeal are working paths — not reassurance copy.
[rule] An encounter may simulate an interface. It may not simulate consent. Consent is a provenance-bearing state transition, not a mood.
Institutional acts
Minimum disclosure and required exit, by act. The exit is not optional — an act without one is not legible as a choice.
Act
Minimum disclosure
Required exit
Notice
Issuer, purpose, effect and effective date
Access to the underlying policy and contact route
Acknowledgement
Exactly what receipt confirms — and what it does not
Copy or durable record
Consent
Party, object, purpose, data, recipient, duration and risk
Refuse, withdraw, correct and obtain remedy
Authorisation
Scope, delegated power, expiry and limits
Revoke or contest authority
Contract / waiver
Commitment, cost, liability, jurisdiction and material exclusions
Review, advice, cancellation and appeal where applicable
Complaint / report
Recipient, use, confidentiality, process and likely timeline
Save, withdraw, correct, escalate and track