The Institutional Legitimacy Experiment: How Systems Built on Fragile Knowledge Collapse in Plain Sight

The Institutional Legitimacy Experiment: How Systems Built on Fragile Knowledge Collapse in Plain Sight examines institutional legitimacy as the final downstream layer of a collapsing epistemic stack. Rather than treating legitimacy as a stable property of modern governance, the essay demonstrates how institutions inherit structural distortions from peer review, academic publishing, disciplinary silos, indexing systems, citation economies, and evidence‑based policy. Drawing on documented patterns of retractions, compromised review processes, publishing inequities, indexing failures, and citation bias, the paper shows how institutions mistake visibility for validity and operationalize epistemic drift as policy. This analysis reframes institutional authority as a visibility‑driven artifact of a fragile knowledge pipeline and exposes the systemic incoherence that emerges when governance depends on structurally unreliable epistemic inputs. The essay argues for the development of integrative, cross‑domain epistemic infrastructures capable of restoring coherence in a post‑web environment.