Working papers
Short papers and notes on the technical, legal, and conceptual questions that arise in the research
These papers document what I have learned, what I have decided, and what remains open. They are working documents, written as the research proceeds, and revised as the argument develops.
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Why this site is hosted on IPFS. Content addressing, the pinning problem, and what IPFS does and does not solve. The distinction between verifiability and legibility runs throughout.
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A survey of on-chain cultural infrastructure and what a genuinely non-proprietary framework would require instead. The orphan works problem, the case against transferable attribution, and the architectural choices that follow.
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The reasoning behind the on-chain attestation register that I built, presented visually. Why it distributes nothing, the four refusals that follow from that, and the temporal span of the works it holds.
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The marketisation of academic citations
On the difference between citation as a market and citation as a record. Why the proposed market in citations reproduces the problem it claims to solve, and what a commons-based alternative looks like.
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What an attestation is, how it differs from a token, and why the distinction is central to the architecture. Includes a working demo of hashing and signing in the browser.
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A non-human agent that resolves the site's DNSLink daily, signs an attestation of the current CID, and publishes it to a public log. A working prototype of an unowned steward, with the log displayed live.
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An interactive graph of the concepts the research works with and the infrastructure decisions that follow from them. Each line is a stated reason, drawn from the site's own pages and project log.