Full Personhood
Corporations have had 140 years of infrastructure that has made them durable over time. Workers have almost none. The asymmetry is architectural before it is political–and AI is forcing the choice between closing it and making it permanent.
Full Personhood: The Governance Model AI Requires, and Capitalism Never Built is the essay that ties together the local-first prototype series, the Seam Stack governance model, and fifteen principles for how personhood: individual, collective, intergenerational, and ecological, should work in systems built around participants rather than platforms.
The Prototypes
The essay's argument is grounded in five working prototypes. Five are live.
| Prototype | Domain | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Governance Window Tracker | AI governance monitoring | Live |
| checkout-seam | Commerce | Live |
| fhir-seam | Healthcare | Live |
| Local-First Social | Social networking | Live |
| employment-seam | Worker records and transitions | Live |
The employment seam is the reference implementation for the essay's central claim: that the worker owns the knowledge graph, the platform facilitates the handoff, and the platform exits.
The Pattern Commons
The architectural patterns behind the prototypes are documented in the Pattern Commons series, an open specification library published alongside the prototype work.
github.com/jediwright/local-first-series
Fifteen Principles
Appendix A of the essay states the governance model in canonical form across four domains. The fifteen principles are not a list of rules the architecture promises to honor. They describe what the architecture, when correctly built, structurally does.
Individual Personhood
I. Personhood is portable. The artifacts of a person's institutional life belong to the person, not to the institutions through which they moved.
II. The record is multi-perspectival and tamper-evident. Contested events are recorded from all participant perspectives. No single party's account is privileged.
III. Legibility is a right, not a condition. A person is legible to institutions they choose to engage with, on terms they control, for the duration they determine.
IV. Power asymmetry is named, not neutralized. When a transition occurs under duress, that context is part of the record, not erased from it.
V. Reciprocity is structural. The governance model encodes obligations running in both directions, not only the institution's claim on the person's output.
Collective Personhood
VI. Collective personhood is co-equal. Communities can hold their own portable record of relationships, knowledge, and decisions on the same terms as any individual entity.
VII. Recognition does not require retention. What the stack guarantees is continuity of the entity, not retention of everything the entity has touched.
VIII. Temporal form is authored, not defaulted. Whether what a person or community builds carries across boundaries, comes to completion, or ends is decided by the holder.
Architectural Enforcement
IX. The platform is structurally minimal. The relay facilitates and exits. It does not accumulate the relationship or position itself as a permanent intermediary.
X. The governance model cannot be overridden by the most powerful party. Cryptographic enforcement is preferred over policy enforcement wherever possible.
Intergenerational and Ecological
XI. The non-human world is a participant, not a resource. The governance model encodes relationships with the living world as relationships with participants that have standing.
XII. Extraction has a ledger. What is taken from the commons is recorded as a taking, made legible at the same level of detail as contribution.
XIII. Future persons have standing. Decisions that irreversibly foreclose options for future persons are constrained by the governance model.
XIV. The stack has a carrying capacity. Infinite accumulation is not a design goal. Concentration is a failure mode, not a success metric.
XV. Regeneration is a first-class operation. You leave the stack in better condition than you found it.