This may be the biggest political change in the whole model. If relational geometry is primary, then power cannot simply mean whoever owns the productive machinery decides. But it also cannot mean everyone decides everything. There is a better concept between those two: jurisdiction.
Authority as jurisdiction
Jurisdiction is the structural expression of consequential participation: the legitimate reach a participant has over a set of conditions is created by the participation, exposure, and consequence that entangle them in it — reach is the source, and bounding is the discipline. A participant who carries a function has standing to exercise that function over a particular territory of decisions. So the question of authority becomes: who has legitimate jurisdiction over this decision, and what constrains that jurisdiction?
Consider a bridge. The engineer has real authority over its tolerances. The community has authority over whether it wants a bridge at all. Residents have standing on questions of displacement. The physical and ecological realities impose constraints none of them can vote away. And the person funding it does not automatically acquire supreme authority merely by holding the capital.
That is radically different from both pure market rule and undifferentiated majority voting. Power becomes functionally distributed: located wherever the relevant function and standing actually sit.
Jurisdictions overlap because consequences overlap
Jurisdiction reads the real pattern of implication; it does not invent it. So it is graded and overlapping rather than cleanly bounded — two participants can both hold legitimate jurisdiction over one matter, unequally, and neither totally, because their consequences overlap. One partner is offered work in another country: the employment decision is principally theirs, but accepting it may reorganize the other’s life, so the second partner holds a real jurisdictional claim over the relocation — not over the first’s career in general — because consequence created participation. A firm owns its machinery, which is a strong claim over how it is deployed; but workers who built the productive system over twenty years, depend on it, hold tacit knowledge of it, and bear the largest downside of its automation hold overlapping claims of their own. Ownership is one source of jurisdiction — neither the only one nor automatically the largest. The framework resolves none of this by decree — workers decide because they are workers, or owners decide because they own — but by reading the actual structure of consequential participation and letting jurisdiction follow it. When those overlapping claims conflict, they are settled the way any contested matter is: decided without a final authority, one matter at a time, with no party owning the whole.
Because that read is always partial, jurisdiction follows consequential participation but never exhausts it — held to proportion by commensurability and kept revisable rather than carved into permanent boundaries.
Every authority carries limits
The key discipline is that each function gets a jurisdiction and a boundary — a mandate paired with a limit. Different functions legitimately decide different things, and none may colonize the whole:
- A function that judges structural viability can determine what is buildable — but not what is worth doing.
- A function that articulates vision and priorities can name what matters — but not what is materially possible.
- A function that exposes contingency can reveal that an arrangement is unnecessary — but not abolish genuine constraints.
Each needs its jurisdiction, and each needs its limits. Taken together, that is almost a constitutional theory built out of differentiated functions rather than out of ownership or headcount — a way of distributing authority that matches it to competence and standing while forbidding any single function from ruling everything. Worked out fully — the governing axis, consequence-weighted decisions, the three kinds of standing, and the ten principles that keep power bounded without producing paralysis — this becomes the model’s whole answer to who gets to decide. And the complete legal architecture that answer implies — standing recognized, competing standings reconciled, jurisdiction assigned and bounded, remedies made, no layer owning the whole — is worked out as a jurisprudence for the ecology. And the hardest application of all — adjudicating not a dispute but a person, when how damaged, how capable, and how burdened are themselves matters of judgment — is worked out in no one decides the whole person.
The hardest test of that idea is property itself: capitalism says ownership is authority, so the jurisdiction move has to be applied to ownership directly — separating a claim on returns from a right to decide who participates. That is ownership under review.