Bounded Interdependence — Reciprocity With Exit 1.2.6

The Problem Bounded Interdependence Solves

Engineered interdependence (1.2.5) established that cooperation must be a design property of systems — not a cultural accident dependent on goodwill, not an imposed condition dependent on authority, but an architectural feature that works because the structure rewards it. Its five components — incentive alignment, participation constraints, credible commitments, structured reciprocity, and polycentric oversight — provide the design discipline for structuring cooperation so that value is created jointly without granting lever points for abuse.

What engineered interdependence did not construct is the structural guarantee that participation remains voluntary over time.

The participation constraint established that every participant must be better off inside a cooperative arrangement than outside it, and that this condition must be continuously satisfied. The checklist in sidebar (1.2.5-2) operationalized that principle. But the participation constraint is a diagnostic — it detects when the condition has been violated. It does not specify the structural mechanisms that prevent the violation from occurring, and it does not define what a participant is entitled to take with them when they leave.

This is the structural gap that bounded interdependence fills. The problem is not hypothetical. The load cases diagnosed in Arc 1 name it precisely. Quiet enclosure — defined in (1.1.1) — is the mechanism by which voluntary participation is converted into structural dependency through the accumulation of switching costs, data lock-in, network effects, and credentialing dependencies. The architecture need not commit a single rights violation to produce this result — and often does not. A person who entered freely and now cannot leave without forfeiting what they brought, what they earned, and in many cases who they are — their professional identity, their social connections, their operational capacity — has not necessarily been wronged in the rights-framework sense. But the arrangement that produced that outcome has failed by its own lights: it has made itself a worse counterparty to any rational participant who can see it coming, and it has manufactured exactly the political constituency that argues, not without cause, for a coercive remedy this framework elsewhere works to avoid providing. Where the terms were imposed retroactively, or broken outright, or obtained by fraud, the participant has been wronged, and RO's existing rights framework already says so without this unit's help. Bounded interdependence addresses the harder case that remains once those wrongs are set aside: an arrangement that violated nothing and still made departure ruinous — a design failure a rational builder has every reason to avoid, whether or not any right was ever infringed.

Traditional Objectivism (TO) recognized the right to exit at the level of principle. Voluntary exchange implies that either party can walk away. Rights (TO) are constraints against force, and the freedom to terminate a relationship is implicit in the freedom to enter one. But TO did not need to address the structural mechanisms by which exit becomes practically impossible while remaining formally available — because the institutional architectures Rand engaged did not yet concentrate departure costs at the scale modern systems produce.

Open Objectivism (OO) added the epistemic discipline: fallibilism (OO) requires that conclusions remain revisable, and Kelley's benevolence — a major Objectivist virtue in its own right, grounded in the same rational egoism that grounds Rand's seven — is a posture toward an unproven counterparty, not an entitlement generated by it: structure can support that posture; it cannot manufacture it. But method and virtue alone do not specify the structural mechanisms that keep alternatives real. A fallibilist who cannot leave a platform because her professional network, client relationships, and business data are locked inside it is exercising epistemic virtue inside a structural cage.

The gap is architectural. TO established that cooperation must be voluntary. OO established that cooperation must be epistemically honest. Engineered interdependence (1.2.5) established that cooperation must be designed. What none of them specifies is the structural requirement that cooperative frameworks must maintain exit that is not merely permitted but practically achievable — that participants can leave without losing their identity, their data, their earned standing, or their capacity to function in the wider world.

Bounded interdependence is Resilient Objectivism's (RO) answer: the design discipline of ensuring that every cooperative framework maintains clean exit, meaningful recourse, and portable standing — so that cooperation remains a structure persons choose to inhabit, not a structure that holds them in place.

The Source Patterns

Bounded interdependence draws from three pattern families, each admitted under the Rule of Admission defined in (1.2.0).

Network Trust and Chokepoint Analysis

Network trust analysis studies how trust, dependency, and power flow through interconnected systems. The structural insight is that not all nodes in a network are equal. Some nodes sit on paths that other nodes must traverse — they are chokepoints. A node that controls a chokepoint controls the flow of value, information, or access through that point, and every other node that depends on that flow is structurally subordinate to the chokepoint controller, regardless of the formal governance arrangement.

Three concepts are load-bearing. Redundancy — the presence of multiple independent paths through a network — is the structural defense against chokepoint power. When there is only one path, whoever controls it controls the network. When there are many paths, no single controller can hold the system hostage. Contestability — the capacity for participants to challenge, route around, or replace a node that abuses its position — is the dynamic complement to redundancy. Redundancy provides alternative paths; contestability provides the mechanism for switching to them. And fault assumptions — the design discipline of assuming that any node can fail, defect, or be captured, and building the system to function regardless — translate the restraint principle's "can the system fail safely?" into network terms.

Sidebar (1.2.6-1) expands the network trust vocabulary in detail.

Admission under the five tests. Network trust and chokepoint analysis describe documented structural dynamics in real networks — communications, financial, logistical, institutional — with extensive empirical and formal grounding. They pass truth-contact. The analysis identifies where power concentrates and how to distribute it — it does not impose authority. It passes non-coercion. The patterns assume that any node may act in its own interest, including against the network — they pass scales without saints. The core concepts (chokepoints, redundancy, contestability, fault tolerance) are expressible in structural terms without disciplinary formalism — they pass plain language. And the analysis operates on network topology and flow, not on personal information — it passes privacy by default.

Exit Rights Theory

Exit rights theory studies the conditions under which departure from a cooperative arrangement is meaningful — not merely formally permitted but practically achievable. The structural insight is that the existence of a right to leave is not the same as the capacity to exercise it. Exit is meaningful only when the departing participant can carry what they brought, retain what they earned, and find or build viable alternatives.

The concept draws from multiple disciplinary traditions. Albert O. Hirschman's framework distinguished between exit and voice as mechanisms for organizational discipline — when members can leave, organizations must remain responsive. Tiebout's model of competitive jurisdictions showed that mobility among alternatives disciplines governance. Contract theory analyzes the conditions under which termination rights are genuine versus nominal. The structural contribution that matters for RO is the convergence: meaningful exit requires that the departing party is not stripped of assets, standing, or operational capacity as a consequence of departure. If leaving is technically possible but practically ruinous, the exit right is decorative — a formal entitlement that cannot be exercised without self-destruction.

Admission. Exit rights theory describes real dynamics in institutional, contractual, and jurisdictional settings — truth-contact. It analyzes voluntary departure, not imposed separation — non-coercion. It is designed for self-interested agents who may leave when remaining no longer serves them — scales without saints. The core concepts (meaningful exit, departure costs, portability of standing) are expressible in plain structural terms — plain language. And the analysis operates on institutional structure and departure conditions, not on personal surveillance — privacy by default.

Portability and Custody Models

Portability and custody models address the specific design question of what a departing participant takes with them and how ownership and stewardship of shared and individual assets are structured during and after cooperation.

Three concepts are load-bearing. Data portability — the capacity to export personal data, work product, and transaction history in usable formats — determines whether departure severs the participant from their own records. Credential independence — the capacity to carry earned qualifications, reputation, and standing without the endorsement of the institution being left — determines whether departure severs the participant from their own professional identity. And custody models — the rules governing who holds, who controls, and who can access shared assets during cooperation and after departure — determine whether the cooperative arrangement treats shared resources as jointly governed or as leverage held by whoever controls the custodial infrastructure.

Admission. Portability and custody models describe real design patterns in data systems, professional credentialing, and cooperative asset management — truth-contact. They specify how persons retain control of what is theirs, not how institutions retain control of persons — non-coercion. They function for self-interested participants who may leave at any time — scales without saints. The vocabulary (portability, custody, credential independence) is structural and plain — plain language. And the design patterns emphasize personal control over personal assets, explicitly separating personal data from institutional data — privacy by default.

What RO Builds

The three admitted pattern families — network trust, exit rights, and portability/custody — describe real structural dynamics. Architects analyze chokepoints. Legal scholars study exit rights. Engineers design portable data standards. But none of them has built what RO builds here. For voluntary cooperative arrangements, the innovation's originality is not that unmanaged lock-in violates a right — in the ordinary case it violates nothing. It is that unmanaged lock-in undermines the cooperation it claims to serve: a design pathology that makes the arrangement a worse counterparty and manufactures the political constituency for a coercive remedy this framework elsewhere argues against providing. Fraud, breach, and terms imposed retroactively remain rights-level wrongs, actionable under RO's existing framework without any help from this unit. Bounded interdependence also states a second, categorically distinct requirement, grounded directly in rights (TO) rather than in any of the three admitted pattern families above: the moral boundary on legitimate public force itself.

Bounded interdependence is defined as the design discipline governing two domains. For voluntary cooperative arrangements, it recommends that every framework maintain clean exit, meaningful recourse, and portable standing — not because departure is owed, but because participation should remain genuinely voluntary and dependencies should remain reversible wherever reversibility is achievable. For the exercise of public force, it states the constitutional boundary directly: the citizen is free to act by right; government is the entity bound, restrained, and permitted only what is explicitly and narrowly authorized. The voluntary half layers structural escape hatches onto the cooperative architecture that engineered interdependence (1.2.5) constructs, so that cooperation designed to create value does not quietly become a worse bargain than it was sold as. The public-force half ensures that the same boundary this unit polices for private architecture — force reserved for its retaliatory use — governs the one actor whose force was never private to begin with.

The voluntary branch sorts into three categories before it reaches its five design-recommendation components. The public-force branch follows as a second branch, not a sixth component — a different kind of claim, stated on its own terms.

Voluntary Arrangements: Three Categories, Not One

Not every switching cost is a wrong, and not every wrong is merely a switching cost. Treating unmanaged lock-in as though it were always a rights violation collapses two registers that need to stay separate. The corrected sort has three parts.

Rights-level wrongs, unchanged and actionable. Fraud at entry. Breach of terms actually agreed. Terms imposed retroactively on a participant who has already sunk costs — the arrangement's controllers unilaterally changing what was agreed after the fact. False or defamatory statements made to third parties about a participant who has departed. These are wrongs under RO's existing rights framework already; White Paper 4 says so directly — fraud and breach "are already rights-level cases." Bounded interdependence does not need a new theory to reach them, and does not dissolve them into the recommendation register below.

Design recommendations, prudentially grounded, not owed to anyone. Exit rights, data portability, credential independence, recourse pathways, and dependency power measurement — the five components below — are recommended because needless lock-in is a defect in the builder's own interest. An arrangement that manufactures unnecessary departure costs is a less attractive counterparty to any rational participant who can see it coming, and it manufactures the political constituency that argues, not without cause, for a coercive remedy this framework elsewhere works to avoid providing. A departing participant has no claim to any of these five components. A builder has a strong, self-interested reason to provide them anyway.

Neither — a hard bargain is not this unit's business. An arrangement can be expensive to leave, disclosed honestly at entry, and lawful, even when the party who agreed to it later wishes it were otherwise. That is not a wrong. It is not something owed. It is nothing for bounded interdependence to prosecute. A unit that cannot name this third category will misread every hard bargain as a violation of the first two — which is the reading this rewrite corrects. The five sections that follow describe what each recommended component requires internally to do its job — the shape a builder who chooses to provide it should give it — not a schedule of entitlements a participant may claim as owed.

Exit Rights

Every participant in a cooperative arrangement must have a structural right to depart — not merely a formal permission, but a designed pathway that preserves what the participant brought and what they earned. Exit rights are the first component because without them, every other component is academic. If the participant cannot leave, portability is irrelevant, recourse is performative, and the participation constraint from (1.2.5) is satisfied only at entry and violated for the duration.

Exit rights have four structural requirements. First, the right must be unconditional in its availability — a participant need not justify departure or obtain permission. The cooperative arrangement may impose reasonable notice periods and transition obligations, but it may not impose conditions that make departure contingent on the arrangement's approval. Second, the right must be exercisable without forfeiture — the participant retains what they brought and receives what they are owed, including earned standing and accumulated contributions. Third, the right must be exercisable without retaliation — departure cannot trigger penalties, exclusion from related systems, or degradation of standing in contexts outside the arrangement. Fourth, the cost of exit must be bounded — switching costs are inevitable, but they must not be architecturally amplified beyond what the cooperation's structural requirements genuinely demand.

Data Portability

A participant who cannot take their data with them cannot meaningfully leave. Data portability requires that every cooperative arrangement design its data architecture so that personal data, work product, and transaction history can be exported in usable, standard formats at any time and without the cooperation of the custodial institution beyond providing the export mechanism.

The distinction between personal data and institutional data is structural. Personal data — the participant's own records, contributions, communications, and transaction history — belongs to the person. Institutional data — the cooperative's aggregated analytics, governance records, and structural metadata — belongs to the institution. Shared data — records of interactions, joint work products, co-created assets — requires a custody model that specifies ownership and portability at the point of creation, not at the point of departure. A cooperative arrangement that defers the custody question until someone leaves has designed a dispute, not a system.

Data portability connects directly to privacy by design (1.2.4): the export must preserve privacy — personal data leaves with the person; other participants' data does not. The design must prevent departure from becoming a data breach in either direction.

Credential Independence

A participant who cannot carry their earned qualifications and standing without the endorsement of the institution they are leaving is not free to leave — they are free to start over. Credential independence requires that credentials, reputation, and earned standing be structured so that they travel with the person, not with the institution.

The design challenge is that many credentials are inherently institutional — a degree, a certification, a professional rating. Credential independence does not require that institutions stop issuing credentials. It requires that the credentialing architecture support independent verification. A credential that can be verified without contacting the issuing institution — through cryptographic attestation, public registries, or portable evidence of competence — is independent. A credential that requires the issuer's ongoing endorsement to remain valid is a leash disguised as a qualification.

This connects to the sovereignty primitives admitted in encoded objective law (1.2.2): attestations, signatures, and verifiable claims provide the technical vocabulary for credential independence. The structural requirement is that no institution should be able to invalidate a person's earned competence by withdrawing its endorsement after the person departs.

Recourse Pathways

Exit is the structural last resort. Before departure, a participant who believes the cooperative arrangement has violated its obligations — eroded the participation constraint, concentrated power beyond bounds, failed to honor credible commitments — must have a mechanism for raising the dispute and obtaining a remedy within the arrangement. Recourse pathways are the design requirement that every cooperative framework include accessible, independent dispute resolution that does not route complaints back through the authority being challenged.

Recourse connects to the polycentric oversight constructed in (1.2.5): distributed governance provides the structural basis for independent review. What bounded interdependence adds is the specific requirement that recourse be designed as a pathway — with defined stages, transparent criteria, bounded timelines, and the capacity to escalate to authorities outside the arrangement when internal mechanisms fail. A recourse pathway that is formally available but practically impossible — buried in complexity, delayed indefinitely, or adjudicated by parties with conflicts of interest — is recourse theater, structurally analogous to the consent theater identified in (1.2.4).

Dependency Power Measurement

The preceding four components specify what a cooperative framework must provide. The fifth component specifies how the framework monitors whether those provisions are real. Dependency power is the degree to which one party's structural position enables it to impose costs on another party's departure. Dependency power measurement is the design requirement that cooperative frameworks include mechanisms for detecting, quantifying, and capping the accumulation of dependency.

The measurement operates on three dimensions. Switching cost accumulation — the rate at which the cost of departure increases over time. If switching costs rise faster than the cooperative surplus, the arrangement is converging on a severe competitive liability. Chokepoint concentration — the degree to which critical functions, data, or access are controlled by a single node. Network trust analysis provides the diagnostic vocabulary. Alternative viability — the availability and accessibility of comparable cooperative arrangements. The participation constraint requires that the participant be better off inside than outside, but if there is no viable outside, the constraint is satisfied trivially and meaninglessly.

Dependency power measurement is not surveillance. It operates on structural features of the cooperative arrangement — cost curves, network topology, market structure — not on the behavior or intentions of individual participants. It is the structural counterpart of the Goodhart hazard named in (1.2.5): where Goodhart's Law warns that incentive metrics can be captured, dependency power measurement warns that cooperative structures can be captured — that the framework designed to create mutual value can evolve into a framework that quietly stops creating it, a design failure tracked here in structural terms rather than left to surface only when a participant finally tries to leave and cannot.

The Public-Force Branch

Everything above governs private architecture — arrangements two or more parties built and can, in principle, unbuild. Government is not private architecture. It is the one actor whose force is not contingent on any participant's consent to be subject to it, and bounded interdependence's second branch states the moral requirement that follows from that difference directly, without borrowing from the three admitted pattern families above.

The one item. Government's proper function is bounded to the retaliatory use of force against those who have themselves initiated it. This is a categorical test, not a scope-of-grant test: a sweeping grant of authority, faithfully and narrowly administered in every particular case, still fails it if the force it authorizes was never retaliatory to begin with. A narrow grant fails it too, on the same ground, if what it authorizes is not this. Breadth and narrowness are both beside the point; the question the test asks is only ever whether the force answers an initiation.

Its corollary. Prior restraint on peaceful action — occupational licensing that forbids practicing a trade before any harm has occurred, industrial policy that directs investment before any wrong has been committed, and the wider family of cases these two exemplify — is already outside the boundary the one item states. Nothing further is required to exclude them, because no initiation has occurred for the restraint to retaliate against. This is not a second constraint bounded interdependence adds alongside the first. It is what the first constraint already implies once it is applied honestly to a case where the triggering initiation is missing. Naming an instance of a test that was already stated is not policy construction, and this unit does not cross into the downstream constitutional-design work it elsewhere declines to do by naming this one.

Indirect force and the civil courts. Taken too literally, the categorical test above would exclude the ordinary work of civil courts: two honest parties in a contract dispute, with no initiator visible on the face of the disagreement. Rand's own resolution is the one this unit adopts: breach is an indirect use of force. A party who takes value under an agreement and then does not perform has, in effect, taken that value under false pretense of future performance — the deception is retroactive, but the taking is real, and the court that adjudicates the breach is retaliating against an initiation that occurred at the moment of non-performance, not inventing a new ground for intervention. This is also where the category-one wrongs named in the voluntary branch above — breach, fraud — connect upward: they are already the indirect-force cases this unit's categorical test was built to reach.

Territorial polycentricity. This unit, and the article surrounding it, endorse polycentric governance and Tiebout's model of competitive jurisdictions without qualification. That endorsement needs a boundary stated plainly: the polycentricity in view is territorial. Many jurisdictions compete for residents and businesses; within each one, a single government holds the monopoly on retaliatory force. This is not the same claim as overlapping, non-territorial enforcement authorities operating inside the same territory — that arrangement resolves, as Rand's own account predicts, into force exercised against force, not into law. Tiebout's competition operates between jurisdictions, at the boundary where a person or firm chooses which territory to inhabit; it does not operate within a single territory as competing claimants to the same monopoly. Stating this plainly closes a relationship the surrounding endorsements left ambiguous.

Objective law, split. Objectivity of law — rules defined and knowable in advance, rather than invented to fit a case after it arises — does two kinds of work, and they belong in two different places. Part of that work conditions the authority's own legitimacy: a narrow jurisdiction, honestly and consistently administered, is nonetheless illegitimate if the rules it applies were invented after the fact, because a jurisdiction that can rewrite its own bounds retroactively was never actually bounded. That much belongs here, as a condition on whether the one item above is satisfied at all. What belongs elsewhere is contestability of a specific exercise, a specific finding, once an authority that clears the legitimacy test has acted — that is encoded objective law's (1.2.2) Requirement A and Requirement B territory, not this unit's.

The cross-reference. (1.2.2) states its own boundary directly, in a passage this unit treats as the paragraph it exists to answer: "What follows governs how delegated or public force is exercised once the force itself is already established as legitimate under RO's inherited rights framework — retaliatory, directed at a party whose own act triggered it, exercised within a delegation the state was entitled to make in the first place. Clearing the requirement below does not certify the underlying exercise of force as legitimate. A conscription statute or an expropriation can be knowable-in-advance, inspectable, and contestable before an independent reviewer, and still be an initiation of force that Arc 1's rights framework — inherited from Traditional Objectivism (TO) — rejects on other grounds. This pattern presupposes that prior question. It does not answer it, and no procedural compliance below should be read as answering it." (1.2.2)'s own examples — a conscription statute, an expropriation — already illustrate the one-item test this unit states in full: both can clear every procedural requirement (1.2.2) governs and still fail here, because neither is retaliatory to an initiation. Bounded interdependence is the answering unit for the question (1.2.2) explicitly declines to take up, not a competing construction running alongside it.

Exit's role, stated without over-conceding. It would be a mistake to ground the public-force branch in the claim that government must bind even those who have not consented to be bound — that concedes the wrong thing, since it treats non-consent as the interesting fact rather than the initiation. The correct and narrower ground: retaliation applies to the party who initiated force whether or not that party consents to be judged for it — a rights-protecting function's core case does not turn on the initiator's consent in the first place. Territorial exit — leaving the jurisdiction — remains a real safeguard against an authority that has drifted from this boundary, but it is secondary, not primary: a safeguard of last resort for a citizen watching the boundary erode, not the mechanism that makes the boundary hold in the first place.

Worked Example: The General Warrant

A general warrant — one that names no particular person, place, or thing to be searched or seized — makes the seam between this unit and (1.2.2) visible in a single fact pattern, and does so more precisely than either fraud prosecution or an asset freeze would. Fraud prosecution answers its own legitimacy question before the example can do any demonstrative work: fraud is already a rights-level wrong, so a fraud prosecution's legitimacy is not in doubt in the way an example needs it to be. An asset freeze under a court order duplicates (1.2.2)'s own worked example exactly, telling the reader nothing this unit alone can show.

The general warrant does what neither can. It can be knowable in advance — published, not improvised. It can be inspectable — its issuance a matter of public record. It can be issued by a judge, and contestable before a reviewer independent of the officer executing it. On every axis (1.2.2)'s adjudication requirement governs — Requirement A's contestability, Requirement B's treatment of irreversible consequences — a general warrant can clear the bar completely. And it can still be illegitimate, because the authority behind it was never properly bounded in the first place: a warrant naming no particular person, place, or thing to be searched or seized authorizes force against whoever the search happens to catch, not against a party whose own act triggered it. It fails this unit's narrow-jurisdiction test on its face, independent of how well its issuance was proceduralized.

One example, two questions, doing independent work. (1.2.2) asks whether the finding behind an action was fairly and contestably reached. This unit asks whether the authority reaching for that finding was ever bounded to begin with. A general warrant can pass the first question in full and fail the second completely — which is exactly the seam the two units were built to hold apart, not paper over.

When Exit Should Be Hard

Not every exit should be easy. This section addresses the voluntary branch specifically; the public-force branch above treats territorial exit as a secondary safeguard rather than the primary mechanism by which the boundary on government force is held.

A surgeon who walks out of an operating room mid-procedure has exit rights that do not extend to that moment. A fiduciary who departs without transitioning the assets they manage has exercised exit in a way that violates obligations they voluntarily assumed. A cooperative member who exits while retaining shared resources they were custodying for others has converted departure into extraction.

These are not exceptions to bounded interdependence. They are applications of it. The structural requirement is not that exit be frictionless — it is that exit constraints be explicit, bounded, and derived from obligations the participant genuinely undertook.

The design discipline has three conditions. First, the constraint must be proportional — its scope must match the obligation it protects. A reasonable notice period is proportional; an indefinite non-compete that prevents the departing participant from practicing their profession is not. Second, the constraint must be time-bounded — it must have a defined expiration. A transition period has a structural end; a permanent obligation tied to departure does not. Third, the constraint must be disclosed at entry — the participant must have known, at the point of joining, what departure would require. Exit constraints imposed retroactively — added to the arrangement after the participant has accumulated switching costs — violate the epistemic conditions for informed consent.

The distinction is between structural exit constraints — which protect the cooperative framework and its other participants from harm caused by abrupt or extractive departure — and coercive retention mechanisms — which use the language of obligation to prevent departure that the arrangement's controllers find inconvenient. The former are legitimate and necessary. The latter are the precise mechanism that bounded interdependence is designed to prevent.

Sidebar (1.2.6-4) expands this distinction with examples and diagnostic criteria.

What RO Takes / What RO Leaves

What RO Takes:

What RO Builds:

Bounded interdependence — the design discipline governing two domains. For voluntary cooperative arrangements: rights-level wrongs (fraud, breach, retroactively imposed terms) remain actionable under RO's existing framework without this unit's help; five components are recommended, not owed — exit rights (unconditional, non-forfeiture, non-retaliatory, bounded-cost departure), data portability (personal data exportable in usable formats with privacy preservation), credential independence (earned standing verifiable without issuer endorsement), recourse pathways (accessible, independent dispute resolution with defined stages and escalation), and dependency power measurement (structural monitoring of switching costs, chokepoint concentration, and alternative viability); and a hard bargain, disclosed at entry, is neither a wrong nor something owed. For the exercise of public force: government's proper function is bounded to the retaliatory use of force against those who have themselves initiated it, with prior restraint on peaceful action excluded as an automatic corollary. The voluntary branch is original because unmanaged lock-in is a design pathology, not a rights violation in itself — it undermines the cooperation it claims to serve and manufactures the constituency for a coercive remedy this framework argues against providing elsewhere. The public-force branch is original because it answers, from within RO's own inherited rights framework, the question encoded objective law (1.2.2) explicitly declines to certify: not how legitimately-bounded force must be exercised, but what makes the boundary itself legitimate in the first place.

What RO Leaves Behind:

• Exit as negotiable option. The claim that exit rights are features to be offered or withheld at the cooperative framework's discretion. bounded interdependence treats exit as recommended architecture, not a feature subject to the builder's whim — the builder's own self-interest, not permission, is what should decide it. Absent clean exit, the arrangement carries a serious, self-inflicted design defect and competitive liability, regardless of how it was entered or how it is governed.

• Forced loyalty. The demand that participants remain in a cooperative arrangement out of obligation, gratitude, or institutional pressure rather than rational choice. Loyalty that survives only because departure is too costly is not loyalty — it is dependence with emotional branding. engineered interdependence (1.2.5) established that cooperation works when the structure rewards it. bounded interdependence establishes the corollary: cooperation that survives only because leaving costs more than staying is not more durable for it — it is weaker, and has simply hidden the weakness behind the appearance of commitment.

• Irrevocable delegation. The claim that once a participant has delegated authority, data, or control to a cooperative framework, the delegation cannot be reversed. Revocability is recommended by default, because it is the safer design and the one a rational counterparty prefers — subject to the proportional, time-bounded, disclosed-at-entry test discussed in the preceding section. But a delegation that is genuinely disclosed at entry and freely contracted as irrevocable — an irrevocable proxy, an outright sale, an assignment entered with eyes open — is not a violation of this pattern. It is a hard bargain: lawful, sometimes unwise, and not something this unit has standing to prosecute. What bounded interdependence actually leaves behind is narrower: the claim that irrevocability, once granted, may not even be examined against what the participant actually agreed to.

• Surveillance-based lock-in detection. The assumption that detecting dependency accumulation requires monitoring participants' behavior, preferences, or intentions. Dependency power measurement operates on structural features — cost curves, network topology, market structure — not on persons. The distinction between auditability and surveillance, established in sidebar (1.2.5-4), applies with equal force to the detection of lock-in.

• Exit without responsibility. The claim that because departure is a right, departing participants owe nothing to the cooperative framework they leave. Exit rights and exit responsibilities are structural complements. The right to leave does not include the right to damage — to extract shared resources, to abandon custodial obligations, or to depart in ways that impose costs the cooperative framework cannot absorb. bounded interdependence designs both sides: clean departure and responsible departure.