Worldhood, Becoming and Closure - Toward a Structural Science of Continuability in Sociotechnical Systems

This preprint develops a foundational structural theory of continuability in sociotechnical systems—defined as the capacity of a system to persist over time without degrading the conditions required for diagnosability, correctability, and adaptive learning. Most evaluations of sociotechnical systems rely on outcome-oriented criteria such as performance, efficiency, compliance, or growth. These evaluative regimes implicitly presuppose that systems retain the structural capacity to recognize degradation, revise operational specifications, and learn from experience when outcomes deteriorate. Empirical research across organizational, administrative, and platform-mediated domains increasingly documents configurations in which this presupposition fails: systems continue to operate, scale, and satisfy formal success criteria while exhibiting declining intelligibility of action, erosion of agency, exhaustion of participants, and collapse of learning capacity. The paper shifts the unit of analysis from outcomes to conditions of continuability. It introduces two constitutive structural kernels—Worldhood and Becoming—and one necessary stabilisation mechanism—Closure. Worldhood denotes the infrastructural condition of shared intelligibility through which actions, signals, rules, and outcomes are interpretable as belonging to the same reality. Becoming denotes the preservation of path-dependent corrective continuity generated through irreversible exposure to error and adjustment over time. Closure denotes the operational specification of rules, procedures, metrics, and constraints that stabilize coordination, while remaining insufficient for continuability when insulated from worldhood and becoming. The theory is structural and non-normative. It specifies invariant constraints governing continuability-bearing systems—systems whose operation depends on participation carrying non-fully externalizable, path-dependent corrective state. On this basis, configurations such as audit lock-in, zombie persistence, and failure under formal success are rendered structurally derivable rather than interpretively asserted. The contribution is foundational rather than prescriptive. The framework does not propose governance models, performance indicators, or ethical judgments. Instead, it establishes analytic conditions under which sociotechnical systems remain intelligible, diagnosable, correctable, and capable of learning over time—and identifies how these conditions can degrade while formal success persists. The preprint is intended for researchers in systems theory, organizational studies, STS, institutional analysis, cybernetics, and related fields concerned with learning, governance, and structural failure modes in complex sociotechnical systems.