The Governance of Co-Experience Transmission: A Generative Relational Theory of Institutional Design under Interpretive Asymmetry

An account of a shared experience is composed by one participant in a relation and used by a third party who took no part in it. An earlier paper in this series established how positive law allocates authority over such an account and stated the conditions any defensible allocation would satisfy, proposing no regime. This paper asks whether an apparatus could administer those conditions, at what cost, and with what failure modes. It argues that only process requirements are available, since an output standard would demand a comparison between an account and the experience it reports that the ontology of the object denies, and that this is the limiting case of a condition under which regulatory theory independently recommends prescribing process rather than output. Five mechanisms are examined against the inherited specification: a duty to solicit and consider the other participant's rendering before issuing, a forum operating before an account is relied upon, preservation of the materials a later reopening would require, expiry of the entitlement to rely, and restriction of exchange. The last is disqualified by the paper's own definition of a mechanism, since the non-occurrence of a private exchange cannot be established; two lines of the specification are reached by nothing available. Three findings run against the proposals. The feature that makes these mechanisms resistant to ceremonial adoption, namely that discharge requires an act by the party they protect, is the feature that places the work upon that party; the cost falls on every occasion of issuance while the benefit falls on the few contested; and raising what is required of an issuer may contract the practice, in a direction that is documented and by a magnitude that is not, falling hardest on those with fewest relations from which an account might be drawn. That result exposes an inconsistency internal to the framework rather than a conflict between the paper's two routes, and two of the framework's criteria are accordingly restated as matters of degree rather than as thresholds.