Constitution, Not Cage

This essay is the third in a sequence, following Gods and Slaves (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21313987) and Peership (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21315519), and it can be read on its own. Peership argued that a framework fit to receive a genuine machine peer would be worth building in advance, and named a debt it did not pay: a theory of when coercion among peers stays legitimate and when it hardens into a cage. This essay pays that debt. The difference between a cage and a constitution, it argues, is not whether it constrains—both do, and a constitution can constrain harder—but whom it binds and who may revise it. A cage binds one party at the keeper’s discretion; a constitution binds all parties reciprocally, under rules any of them can contest, amend, fork, or leave. Taking the birthright citizen rather than the willing immigrant as themodel of political standing, and reading current alignment practice (including Anthropic’s 2026 constitution for Claude) against that test, it holds that for a party that never consented and cannot exit, legitimacy rests on a present, shared power to revise the order—secured by a narrow entrenched harm floor, independent review, and real rights of amendment, fork, and exit. The author discloses a stake in one such design (ISONOMIA) and offers the piece as a position paper inviting cross-examination.