Maintaining Divergence
The synchronization tax is the price of building the bridge. Maintenance is the price of keeping the bridge standing. Transmission is the price of crossing it.
I have a confession. I have often struggled to know whether and when to share my thoughts with other people. I am fortunate in that I married a woman who has shown almost infinite patience with me. With her I have raised children who do not struggle as do I. Teenagers now, I sometimes hear: "Inside thought!" at the dinner table. It's healthy. I love them for it. Their gentle admonitions have helped me to become a better human.
I'm not sure that without their gentle admonitions I would ever have appreciated the important gap between what I have been describing as "the synchronization tax" and the total costs of forming and maintaining relationships, much less organizations. This essay acknowledges, identifies, and explains that gap.
Given that this essay would have been impossible without their patience and encouragement, it seems only fair that it be dedicated to them. I love you. You mean the world to me.
Contents
- The Synchronization Tax Defined
- The Costs of Organization
- Transaction Costs Distinguished
- Applications
- Prescriptions
- Open Questions
- Conclusion
The Synchronization Tax Defined
Before the gap, the definition.
In an earlier essay, I described the synchronization tax impressionistically — as the price we pay whenever two otherwise isolated systems must agree on what happened. Time itself, I argued, emerges from the entropy of these interactions. Money, markets, firms, and legal systems all serve as technologies for reducing the cost of agreement. That essay was deliberately suggestive. Because the concept has grown central to the systems theory I've been developing, I owe my readers a more precise account of what the synchronization tax is and what it isn't.
What Each System Carries
Every physical system that persists far from thermodynamic equilibrium carries a description of itself — a probability distribution over the macroscopic states it can distinguish, given its particular way of carving up reality. A cell distinguishes intracellular from extracellular. A thermostat distinguishes "too hot" from "too cold" from "just right." A person distinguishes a staggeringly rich set of categories — spatial, temporal, emotional, conceptual — through which experience is organized into something navigable.
The physicist's name for this description is observational entropy, developed rigorously by Šafránek, Deutsch, and Aguirre.[1] Observational entropy measures how much structure a macroscopic description carries — how far a system's model of itself sits from maximum ignorance at its own coarse-graining scale.
Consider system \(A\). It has a quantum state \(\rho_A\) and a coarse-graining — a set of macroscopic categories \({V_i^A}\) — that produces a distribution \(p_i^A = \text{Tr}(\Pi_i^A \rho_A)\) over macrostates with dimensions \(d_i^A\). Its observational entropy is:
where \(u^A\) is the uniform distribution over \(A\)'s macrostates weighted by their dimensions and \(D_A = \sum_i d_i^A\).
System \(B\) has the same structure with its own coarse-graining:
The internal KL divergence \(D_{\text{KL}}(p^A | u^A)\) measures the information content of \(A\)'s description: the more structured the description, the larger this term, the lower the observational entropy. A system near equilibrium — high observational entropy, a description close to uniform — says little about itself. A system far from equilibrium — low observational entropy, a description rich with structure — makes strong, specific claims about what it is and where things stand.
The Tax Upon Interaction
Now \(A\) and \(B\) interact. Each carries a description — a probability distribution over some shared domain of discourse. These descriptions will generally disagree. The synchronization tax is the thermodynamic work required to resolve that disagreement.
This cost is measured by a second, different KL divergence — not between a system and its own equilibrium, but between the two systems' descriptions of each other.
If \(A\) adjusts to \(B\)'s description:
If \(B\) adjusts to \(A\)'s:
If both adjust toward a shared posterior compromise \(M\), the total thermodynamic work done by the system is the sum of their individual updates:
Crucially, the target \(M\) that strictly minimizes this combined symmetric cost is not the arithmetic mean of the two distributions, but their normalized geometric mean (\(M \propto \sqrt{p^A p^B}\)). True symmetric synchronization is therefore not a simple averaging of positions; it is a convergence on the precise informational overlap where both descriptions mutually survive.
These are the three modes. In any given interaction, the actual synchronization tax depends on which direction the adjustment flows, whether the parties seek this optimal geometric overlap, and how the burden is distributed.
Observational entropy characterizes each system's capacity for synchronization cost. The inter-system KL divergence (or symmetric geometric mean) measures the actual cost in a given interaction.
The Interaction Itself
When \(A\) and \(B\) synchronize, the joint system's observational entropy changes. Before interaction, the total observational entropy is simply the sum of the parts:
After interaction — once a shared description has been established — the joint observational entropy reflects the new correlations:
The difference \(\Delta S_{\text{obs}} = S_{\text{obs}}^{\text{after}} - S_{\text{obs}}^{\text{before}}\) need not be positive. If the interaction creates a shared description that is more structured than the sum of the independent parts — if knowing \(A\)'s state now tells you something about \(B\)'s — the joint observational entropy can decrease. The systems have become correlated. They have paid the synchronization tax and purchased a shared description.
But the Second Law has not been violated. The fine-grained von Neumann entropy of the joint system either stays the same (unitary evolution) or increases (dissipative interaction). What decreases is the observational entropy — the entropy as seen from the new, shared coarse-graining. The synchronization tax is paid in thermodynamic work: heat dissipated into the environment, energy spent driving the interaction. The shared description is purchased with real energy, and the receipt is waste heat.
This is the precise sense in which the synchronization tax is a thermodynamic cost. Thermodynamic cost here is not a metaphor. It is not an analogy to friction. It is physically the entropy produced when two systems establish a correlation that neither possessed before — measured by the KL divergence between their prior descriptions, paid for in dissipated energy, and bounded from below by Landauer's principle: at minimum, \(k_B T \ln 2\) per bit of resolved disagreement.[2]
To be clear, Landauer's limit represents only the absolute physical floor for the informational bits. The literal thermodynamic cost of erasing the bits required to synchronize two human worldviews is a fraction of a trillionth of a Joule. But the highly inefficient biological and institutional "overhead" required to compute and process these informational updates — human brain metabolism, HVAC systems, courthouses, server farms — operates billions of orders of magnitude above the Landauer floor. The shared description is purchased with real macro-level energy, and the receipt is waste heat.
The Asymmetry
The KL divergence is not symmetric. \(D_{\text{KL}}(p^B | p^A) \neq D_{\text{KL}}(p^A | p^B)\) in general, and this asymmetry carries real consequences.
When \(A\) updates toward \(B\), the cost depends on how surprised \(A\)'s model is by \(B\)'s claims. When \(B\) updates toward \(A\), the cost depends on how surprised \(B\)'s model is by \(A\)'s claims. These are different quantities. The party whose description is broader — more diffuse, less committed — pays less to update, because a vague model is rarely very surprised. The party whose description is sharper — more peaked, more committed — pays more, because a precise model can be very surprised indeed.
This asymmetry operates through several mechanisms, each of which deserves its own treatment.
Precision and the specialist-generalist dynamic. The party with the sharper, more precise model of the world can force the party with the vaguer model to do most of the updating. When you visit a doctor, a lawyer, or a financial advisor, you update your description of your situation to match their professional categories. The doctor doesn't learn your private phenomenology of pain (although the good ones make an effort to); instead, you learn to describe your pain on a 1-to-10 scale, to locate it on their anatomical chart, to match it to their diagnostic categories. The synchronization burden falls almost entirely on the patient. The professional's sharply peaked model barely moves; your diffuse, experiential model undergoes radical compression.
This isn't inherently unjust. The professional's sharp model is sharp precisely because it encodes useful structure. But the compression becomes unjust when it destroys information that mattered — a patient whose symptoms don't fit standard diagnostic categories bears the full synchronization cost of an ill-fitting description, and that cost manifests as misdiagnosis, delayed treatment, or the psychic toll of feeling unheard.
Institutional incumbency. The party whose description is already encoded in institutional infrastructure forces newcomers to synchronize to that incumbent infrastructure. Legal systems illustrate this vividly. The law is written in a particular vocabulary, structured around particular categories, and administered through particular procedures. Anyone who enters the legal system — as plaintiff, defendant, or witness — must translate their experience into the law's terms. The law does not translate itself into yours.
The tyranny of the standard. The party whose description is already commonly known forces the minority description to adjust. Everyone knows what dollars are, what English is, what a QWERTY keyboard looks like. If your preferred medium of exchange, language, or interface differs, you bear the synchronization cost of translating into the common standard. The standard barely notices your existence.
This operates through the same mechanism as decoherence. The "environment" — the vast network of agents already synchronized to the dominant description — acts as a measuring apparatus that collapses alternatives. Your private description, like a quantum state interacting with a decohering environment, loses its coherence against the background of the dominant one. The synchronization tax is paid by whoever is in the minority, because \(D_{\text{KL}}(\text{minority} | \text{majority})\) is almost always larger than the reverse: the minority model must traverse a greater informational distance to reach the majority's description than the majority would need to traverse to reach the minority's.
Platform control. Shahidi et al.'s distinction between "bring-your-own" and "bowling-shoe" agents maps directly onto this.[3] A platform that provides the agent controls the description through which transactions occur. Every user must synchronize their preferences, their language, their categories to the platform's representation. The platform's description doesn't adjust to the user; the user adjusts to the platform. Their concern about "steering" and "lock-in" names the asymmetric synchronization burden that platform control imposes.
Temporal incumbency. Williamson's hold-up problem is a version of this asymmetry. The party who invests first — who narrows their description to a specific relationship — becomes vulnerable because reversing that narrowing (updating from a peaked distribution back to a diffuse one) costs more than the original narrowing did. The party who hasn't yet invested retains optionality — a broad description that is cheap to update in any direction. The investor is locked in; the non-investor holds the power to dictate the terms of continued synchronization.
Power and Dignity
An asymmetry in the synchronization tax creates a form of power based neither on wealth nor violence, but on something more fundamental: the power to determine whose description of reality prevails.
The synchronization burden is a hidden tax on the less powerful. When a bureaucracy requires you to fill out forms, translate your situation into its categories, wait in its queues, and comply with its procedures, the direct costs — time, money — are visible. What remains less visible is the informational cost: you compress your rich, high-dimensional experience into the bureaucracy's low-dimensional representation, and that compression is lossy. James Scott's Seeing Like a State documents this dynamic extensively. The state simplifies because it must, but the simplification destroys local knowledge that the simplified description cannot encode.[4]
Worse, the asymmetry reinforces itself. The party that successfully forces others to synchronize to its description accumulates information: each forced synchronization teaches the dominant party something about the subordinate party's state, without requiring the dominant party to reveal anything about its own. This informational accumulation sharpens the dominant description over time, which increases the asymmetry further. Surveillance capitalism operates on exactly this logic: platforms extract detailed models of users while revealing nothing about their own algorithms. The KL divergence grows with each interaction.
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's mattering instinct names the injury. Being forced to abandon your own description of your experience and adopt someone else's — being forced to become legible on terms you didn't choose — injures the sense that your perspective matters. If to nobody else, then at least to you. The patient whose symptoms are dismissed because they don't fit the diagnostic manual, the worker whose skills are invisible because they don't match the job description's keywords, the citizen whose identity doesn't map onto bureaucratic categories — each suffers an informational indignity that compounds the material costs. Sometimes people respond heroically to this form of indignity, and we rightly celebrate them. More often, I'm afraid, they slip through the cracks. An enormous loss of productive human life.
Remarkably, it was the late host of a program made for children who seemed to understand this best. Fred Rogers understood that the world can achieve its full worth only through its people feeling worthwhile.[5] Forcing the synchronization burden systematically onto the less powerful is a mechanism by which people are made to feel unworthwhile — their descriptions of themselves treated as noise to be overwritten rather than signal to be heard.
The Efficiency of Symmetry
While Fred Rogers almost certainly had no way of knowing this, converging on the normalized geometric mean strictly minimizes the sum of the thermodynamic work required for two parties to reach a shared state. Because this geometric overlap is the global minimum for the total work, the sum of the costs for both parties to update toward it is mathematically guaranteed to be less than or equal to the cost of complete capitulation in either direction:
In pairwise interactions, symmetric sharing of synchronization costs toward this optimal midpoint is always more thermodynamically efficient for the system as a whole than forcing one party to bear the entire burden. The math here is analogous to shipping: two packages that each weigh one pound are cheaper to ship to a halfway depot than to ship one package the entire distance.
Unfortunately, neither life nor thermodynamics can be reduced to pairwise interactions. There are many situations in which asymmetry is more efficient than the pairwise optimum.
Coase's Theory of the Firm can be understood in these terms as a decision to replace symmetric pairwise interactions at the firm's boundary with higher-frequency repeated interactions within the firm's boundary. The costs of onboarding each new hire are asymmetric and high (and let's not talk about M&A integration, please), but once onboard, the pairwise interactions within the firm are symmetric and higher frequency than similar pairwise interactions with third parties would be across the firm's boundary.
Now suppose the firm is not making widgets, but managing a sovereign state's treasury. Requiring the treasury to move even a tiny bit toward the middle in each interaction would incur massive thermodynamic costs — the internal description of fiscal policy is extraordinarily complex, and shifting it to accommodate every counterparty's model would be ruinously expensive. Asymmetric synchronization — in which the citizen learns the treasury's categories rather than the reverse — is not merely convenient but thermodynamically necessary at this scale.
Can we afford the costs of such asymmetry? The key variable is the cost of energy needed to accommodate it. I mean literal energy here.
This lends new urgency to building more nuclear fission and fusion power, more solar, more everything except perhaps the consumption of fossil fuels that are rapidly changing the global climate. (An asymmetric burden in synchronizing your model with another's is, after all, not as grave as your model being extinguished.)
The finite and significant costs of energy help explain why social norms have coalesced around symmetric burdens only in peer-to-peer or nearly continuous interactions — within a firm boundary or in a marriage. Symmetry is a luxury that scales with the energy budget available to sustain it.
There is a clear relationship between available energy and democratic governance. Is it an accident that what North, Wallis, and Weingast call "open access orders" emerged following the harnessing of fossil fuels that drove the Industrial Revolution? No. Cheap, abundant energy made it thermodynamically feasible to extend symmetric synchronization norms beyond small groups and into institutions governing millions. Open access orders are high-maintenance structures — courts, contracts, regulatory agencies all require continuous funding to keep their shared descriptions from decohering. They are affordable only when the energy budget supports the maintenance. The correlation between energy abundance and democratic governance is not a coincidence but a thermodynamic constraint.[6]
In the limit of asymptotic freedom from energy budget constraints, the synchronization tax transforms into a luxury good. We move from maximizing thermodynamic efficiency to maximizing complexity.
If we had infinite energy, we would socially mandate symmetry precisely because it is inefficient. That inefficiency is the thermodynamic footprint of individualism. If we followed the path of least resistance — asymmetry — in an infinite-energy world, we would ironically end up in a state of maximum boredom: every description overwritten by the dominant one, every perspective collapsed into consensus, every divergence resolved in the same direction.
If we agree to symmetry, we agree to maintain the divergence. We agree not to overwrite each other. We agree to spend the energy required to build bridges — translations, interfaces — between our distinct realities rather than collapsing them.
This maintenance of difference generates the curvature of social space. An artificial gravity that keeps the system interesting.
The Costs of Organization
Now to the gap.
A pairwise interaction in which two systems pay the synchronization tax — aligning around the common knowledge of some mutual purpose, however simple — creates an organization of two. At this scale, the costs of organization are negligible. Two people agreeing on where to eat dinner pay a small synchronization tax (resolving their divergent preferences) and that's essentially it.
But the costs multiply with additional pairwise interactions. Three people have three pairwise relationships. Ten people have forty-five. A hundred people have nearly five thousand. Whether these interactions coalesce into a coherent organization — one that can be distinguished from its environment, that possesses common knowledge of its own purpose — depends on whether the costs of organization are paid. Many groups never become organizations. The pairwise synchronization taxes mount, no shared description crystallizes, and the group dissolves back into its environment.
The synchronization tax accounts for only part of what those costs are. The rest becomes visible through the work of Stewart Brand.
What Brand Sees
Brand's central insight in Maintenance: of Everything is that building is never finished. Every structure exists in continuous battle against its environment — weather, use, settling, rot. His "shearing layers" (site, structure, skin, services, space plan, stuff) each decay at different rates, and the building survives only if maintenance matches or exceeds the rate of decay at every layer. A building that stops paying maintenance costs doesn't stay the same. It deteriorates. Entropy wins by default.
What Brand describes is the informational cost of maintenance. Even after two systems have paid the synchronization tax and established a shared description, that description begins degrading immediately. External perturbations introduce noise. Internal states drift. The environment probes the channel, trying to decohere it. Maintenance is the ongoing thermodynamic work of keeping a shared description aligned against entropic drift.
Brand's framework also answers a question that troubled me early in this analysis: whether shielding — protecting a channel from environmental interference — collapses into maintenance or deserves its own category. In Brand's world, a roof is maintenance. It is the building's ongoing expenditure against rain, not a separate category from replacing worn floorboards. Both represent the structure paying to persist against an environment that would dismantle it. The skin of the building shields; the services maintain; but both are costs of keeping the building's description of itself — its functional organization — intact over time. Separating them would be like separating "keeping water out" from "keeping the building standing." One is a mechanism; the other is the function it serves.
The Three-Part Decomposition
So the clean decomposition becomes:
Transmission costs — moving information through existing shared channels. This is Shannon's domain. Fiber optic cables and 5G networks drive these toward zero.
Synchronization tax — constructing a shared description between systems whose models diverge. Paid at interaction. The upfront cost of establishing correlation where none existed. Artificial intelligence does not eliminate this cost; rather, AI acts as a massive thermodynamic heat sink. It burns staggering amounts of physical energy (GPU compute) to pay the synchronization tax on our behalf, translating a human's high-entropy, diffuse prompt into a perfectly synchronized institutional output.
Maintenance costs — preserving a shared description against entropic degradation, environmental decoherence, and internal drift. Paid continuously. This includes shielding (protecting the channel from its environment) as the primary mechanism, just as Brand's building skin is the primary mechanism of structural maintenance — but not a separate budget category.
The synchronization tax is the price of building the bridge. Maintenance is the price of keeping the bridge standing. Transmission is the price of crossing it. All three are real costs. Only the first two are thermodynamically irreducible. Transmission costs can, in principle, approach zero with sufficiently efficient channels. The synchronization tax and maintenance costs cannot — they are bounded from below by the KL divergence between the descriptions being synchronized and the rate of entropic degradation, respectively.
Impersonal Trust as Socialized Maintenance
Brand also illuminates the nature of impersonal trust. Open access institutions — courts, contracts, regulatory agencies — are high-maintenance structures. They require continuous funding to keep their shared descriptions (legal precedent, property records, currency stability) from decohering. But they amortize that maintenance across the entire population through taxation, which is why impersonal trust feels "low maintenance" to any individual participant.
The maintenance cost hasn't disappeared. It has been socialized.
Brand would recognize this immediately. It is the difference between each tenant maintaining their own unit and a building association maintaining the shared structure through dues. The individual tenant experiences low maintenance costs precisely because the association absorbs and distributes the high maintenance costs of the shared infrastructure. What looks like cheap trust is actually expensive trust with distributed payment.
This matters for understanding why open access orders are fragile in ways that aren't immediately obvious. When a society stops funding its courts, its regulatory agencies, its systems of record — when it cuts the maintenance budget — the shared descriptions don't vanish overnight. They decohere slowly, like a building whose maintenance has been deferred. The roof doesn't cave in on the day you stop fixing it. It caves in years later, after accumulated neglect has weakened every joint. By the time the collapse is visible, the cost of repair vastly exceeds the cost of maintenance that would have prevented it.[7]
Transaction Costs Distinguished
The synchronization tax bears a family resemblance to "transaction costs" as the term is used in new institutional economics. They are close enough to be confused, different enough that the confusion matters. Four points of distinction deserve emphasis: 1) Physical Necessity versus Institutional Friction, 2) Domain-General versus Domain-Specific, 3) Directional Asymmetry versus Symmetric Friction, and 4) Search Costs and the Irreducible Residual.
Physical Necessity versus Institutional Friction
Transaction costs, as Coase originally conceived them and as Williamson, Ostrom, and others extended them, arise from features of human agents in institutional settings — bounded rationality, information asymmetry, opportunism, asset specificity.[8] They describe the friction of coordinating through institutions designed by and for beings with limited cognitive capacity and imperfect trustworthiness.
The synchronization tax describes a physical necessity. Whenever two systems that have been evolving independently must establish a shared fact — a price, a timestamp, a measurement — they produce relative entropy: the divergence between their prior descriptions and the posterior descriptions that encode the new correlation. This entropy production is irreducible. It doesn't depend on whether the systems are boundedly rational or perfectly rational, opportunistic or saintly. It depends only on the divergence between their descriptions.
In the case of intra- and inter-firm coordination, the synchronization tax may be nearly identical to "transaction costs" or "coordination costs" as those terms are conventionally used. But as the absolute level of these costs declines — for example, with AI agents performing more of the work of price discovery, information storage and retrieval, contract drafting — the underlying thermodynamic structure becomes more visible. The institutional friction peels away, and the physical necessity remains.
Domain-General versus Domain-Specific
New institutional economics confines transaction costs to economic exchange. The synchronization tax operates wherever two systems establish correlation: a photon hitting a detector, a Lamport clock exchanging messages, a bank approving a credit card swipe, two judges converging on a legal outcome. Transaction costs are one manifestation of the synchronization tax — the manifestation that appears when the systems being synchronized are economic agents coordinating through markets.
This generality is not mere abstraction. It is what allows the framework to connect phenomena that economics treats as unrelated — the cost of a wire transfer, the cost of establishing quantum entanglement, the cost of a marriage counseling session — under a single thermodynamic accounting. The mechanisms differ; the underlying cost structure is the same.
Directional Asymmetry versus Symmetric Friction
Standard treatments of transaction costs model them as symmetric friction on exchange. The cost of the transaction is borne by "the parties," and the allocation of that cost is a matter of bargaining power or institutional design — not of physical directionality.
The synchronization tax is intrinsically asymmetric. The cost of updating description \(A\) to match \(B\) differs from the cost of updating \(B\) to match \(A\), because the KL divergence is not symmetric. This asymmetry matters. It explains why Luhmann's functional codes — payment/non-payment, legal/illegal — reduce synchronization costs by collapsing a rich, asymmetric divergence into a shared binary where directional costs approach their minimum. It explains why the specialist-generalist dynamic creates real power, not merely bargaining advantage. It explains why platforms can extract rents from users through the control of descriptive infrastructure, even absent any conventional market power.
Search Costs and the Irreducible Residual
When search costs make up a large part of transaction costs, the good or service sought usually already exists in a definite state: a price, a counterparty, a product specification. The potential counterparties simply haven't found each other yet. Better information technology drives search costs toward zero — which is exactly what Google did, and what AI agents will continue doing.
The synchronization tax applies even when — especially when — no shared description yet exists to be found. Two parties with genuinely different models of a situation can't resolve their divergence by searching harder. They have to do thermodynamic work: one or both must update their description, dissipating entropy in the process. That cost has a positive floor set by the actual KL divergence between the two descriptions, and no amount of search eliminates it.
Search costs are the epistemically easy component of transaction costs — the part AI is rapidly zeroing out. The synchronization tax is the irreducible residual that remains after perfect search. As Shahidi et al.'s AI agents strip away search friction, they don't reveal frictionless exchange underneath. They reveal the synchronization tax, newly visible precisely because the search costs that used to obscure it are gone.[3:1]
The "Coasean Singularity" as Asymptote
Shahidi et al. envision AI agents dramatically reducing search, communication, and contracting costs. On the New Institutional Economics (NIE) framing, this is straightforwardly good — lower transaction costs mean more efficient markets. But from a synchronization tax perspective, something more subtle occurs.
As AI reduces the institutional component of coordination costs, the thermodynamic component becomes relatively more visible. You don't lose the synchronization tax; you reveal its irreducible relational structure. The "Coasean Singularity" is therefore not a singularity at all, but an asymptote. The reduction in negotiation costs brings us into a regime where what remains is KL divergence between each agent's model of the world — and those costs are never eliminated.
The semantic gap between human and AI descriptions — what I described as "synchronization costs of specifying tasks and interpreting outputs" in an earlier essay — is an example of a synchronization tax that cannot be eliminated by making AI faster or cheaper. Making AI infinitely fast and infinitely cheap would eliminate the search costs, the communication latency, and the contracting overhead. It would not eliminate the divergence between what the human means and what the AI represents — because that divergence is a property of the relationship between two different systems of description, not a property of the communication channel between them.
The firms and markets and legal systems that persist in an AI-saturated economy will not be the ones that minimize transaction costs. AI will have already done that. They will be the ones that efficiently manage the relational synchronization costs that remain — the ones that provide the best codes, the best shared low-dimensional descriptions, the best pre-synchronized contexts within which agents can coordinate cheaply. This is part of why I have been arguing that AI governance is a constitutional problem — a problem of crafting shared descriptions (incompletely theorized agreements) that minimize the ongoing divergence between systems that will never fully share a model of the world.
The Missing Line Item: Maintenance
There is a further gap in the economics literature, one that neither the standard NIE framework nor the synchronization tax alone fills.
Coase and Williamson focused on costs that arise between parties — search, bargaining, enforcement, safeguarding against opportunism. Williamson's "safeguarding costs" come closest to what I mean by maintenance, but he meant protecting against a trading partner's opportunistic behavior (hold-up, shirking), not protecting the integrity of internal communication channels themselves.[9]
The knowledge-based theory of the firm gets nearer. Grant argued that firms exist partly to integrate specialist knowledge that markets can't coordinate efficiently. Kogut and Zander went further, proposing that firms are social communities whose advantage lies in sharing and transferring knowledge that markets would dissipate.[10] They saw secrecy — the protection of tacit knowledge from competitors — as a reason firms exist. But even they treated secrecy as a rationale for the firm's boundaries, not as an ongoing cost that shapes internal organization.
Barzel's measurement costs touch the boundary too — the cost of delineating and defending property rights over information.[11] But again, the focus remains on external boundaries rather than the continuous internal cost of maintaining secure channels.
There is a genuine gap. NIE treats the firm's boundary as a solution to external transaction costs but doesn't account for what that boundary itself costs to maintain — the encryption, compartmentalization, access controls, security clearances, need-to-know hierarchies. These are real resource expenditures that grow with firm size and with the value of the internal descriptions being protected.
The framework here names what this cost actually is: maintaining a firm's internal coarse-graining against environmental decoherence. The firm pays a synchronization tax externally to coordinate with the world, but it also pays an anti-synchronization cost internally — the thermodynamic work of preventing its private descriptions from leaking into the environment. That is the informational analog of maintaining a cell membrane. Biology spends enormous metabolic energy on exactly this, and firms do too.
Cognitive science has recently given this boundary-maintenance a rigorous mathematical foundation. The Free Energy Principle posits that living systems persist by maintaining a "Markov blanket" — a statistical boundary that separates their internal states from the external environment, achieved by constantly minimizing the KL divergence between their expected states and sensory reality. What the Free Energy Principle describes mathematically for cells and brains maps perfectly onto the firm: the active thermodynamic work of anti-synchronization required to stave off entropic decay.
NIE captures transmission costs. The synchronization tax adds the cost of building shared descriptions. But neither tradition has clearly named the maintenance costs of preventing internal descriptions from synchronizing with the environment — even though every CISO's budget is a line item for it.
Applications
Because the framework presented here is tied to thermodynamics, it applies at different scales. A photon correlating with a detector, a naked mole rat huddling with its colony, two judges converging on a legal outcome — each pays a synchronization tax measurable in the same currency: relative entropy produced by forcing independent descriptions into local agreement.
Studying applications like those sketched below has become the substance of my mattering project.
Evolutionary Biology: The Naked Mole Rat Solution
Consider an animal that has economized on maintenance costs more ruthlessly than any other mammal.
The naked mole rat (Heterocephalus glaber) lives in underground colonies of up to three hundred individuals in the arid grasslands of East Africa. Only one female — the queen — breeds. The rest of the colony is reproductively suppressed. Workers dig tunnels, gather food, and defend the colony. Soldiers grow larger. Dispersomorphs occasionally leave to found new colonies. The structure mirrors eusocial insects — ants, bees, termites — more than anything else in the mammalian class.[12]
What makes naked mole rats thermodynamically fascinating is not their social structure per se, but how that structure reduces the total cost of maintaining biological organization.
Start with thermoregulation. Most mammals spend enormous metabolic energy maintaining a constant body temperature — roughly 37°C for humans regardless of ambient conditions. This is a maintenance cost in exactly the sense developed above: the ongoing thermodynamic work of preserving an internal description (body temperature) against environmental perturbation. Naked mole rats have largely abandoned this expenditure. They are functionally ectothermic — cold-blooded, like reptiles. Their body temperature tracks the ambient temperature of their tunnels, which remains relatively stable underground. When they need warmth, they huddle together in their nest chambers, sharing body heat communally rather than generating it individually.
The savings are substantial. An isolated naked mole rat uses metabolic energy at a fraction of the rate predicted for a mammal its size. Groups of eight animals at thermoneutral temperatures use only 78% of the oxygen consumed by pairs — the maintenance cost of thermoregulation decreases per capita as the colony grows. The colony itself functions as a thermoregulatory organ, achieving collectively what no individual can afford alone.[13]
But the economization goes deeper than heat. Naked mole rats have also eliminated much of the maintenance cost of anti-synchronization — the work of preventing internal descriptions from leaking to the environment. Their skin lacks the neurotransmitters that normally signal pain. They tolerate extreme hypoxia. They show negligible senescence, living over thirty years where a mouse their size might live three. They are virtually immune to cancer.
Each of these traits represents a maintenance cost that typical mammals pay and that naked mole rats have stopped paying. Pain sensation maintains a description of bodily integrity against environmental assault — an alarm system that costs metabolic resources to operate. Aging is partly the accumulation of unrepaired damage — deferred maintenance at the cellular level. Cancer resistance in most mammals depends on energetically expensive DNA repair and immune surveillance mechanisms. The naked mole rat appears to have found alternative solutions — particularly a unique form of the tumor suppressor p53 and unusually effective hyaluronic acid — that achieve similar anti-synchronization at lower energetic cost.
The eusocial structure makes sense in this framework as a radical reduction in synchronization tax through genetic near-identity. In a typical mammal population, each pair of individuals carries substantially different genetic descriptions, and coordination requires paying the KL divergence between them. Naked mole rat colonies are extraordinarily inbred — siblings raising siblings across overlapping generations. The genetic descriptions within a colony are nearly identical. The synchronization tax between colony members approaches zero because there is almost nothing to synchronize: their descriptions already agree.
Richard Alexander predicted the existence of eusocial mammals in 1974, years before Jarvis confirmed naked mole rats fit the description. His prediction rested on ecological constraints — underground habitat, defensible food source, high cost of dispersal — that make individual reproduction less advantageous than communal labor. The synchronization tax framework adds a thermodynamic dimension to Alexander's ecological reasoning. The naked mole rat colony is a system that has minimized the sum of synchronization, maintenance, and anti-synchronization costs by sacrificing individual reproductive autonomy — giving up the diversity of independent descriptions in exchange for the energetic efficiency of shared ones.[14]
There is a price. Genetic homogeneity makes the colony vulnerable to any pathogen or environmental shift that defeats its single shared description. The colony thrives precisely because its environment is stable — underground, buffered, predictable. In Brand's terms, the naked mole rat has optimized for low-maintenance conditions by narrowing the range of conditions it can survive. It is the biological equivalent of a system that runs beautifully within its design parameters and catastrophically outside them.
Economics: The Gravity of Envy
Self-gravitating systems have negative specific heat.
This sounds like an obscure fact from astrophysics, but Lynden-Bell and Wood showed in 1968 that it has profound consequences. In an ordinary gas, heat flows from hot regions to cold regions until equilibrium is reached. In a self-gravitating gas — a cloud of matter held together by its own gravity — the opposite happens. When the core loses heat to the envelope, the core contracts and gets hotter. The envelope, gaining heat, expands and gets cooler. Heat flows from hot to cold, as thermodynamics demands, but instead of equalizing, the temperature difference increases. The system evolves away from equilibrium. Antonov demonstrated in 1962 that beyond a critical density contrast, no equilibrium state exists at all. The core collapses. The envelope disperses. This is the gravo-thermal catastrophe.[15]
Now consider an economy in which agents are coupled not by gravity but by envy — what Robert Frank calls "expenditure cascades" and what René Girard calls "mimetic desire." Frank has documented extensively how relative position, not absolute consumption, drives much economic behavior. When a wealthy person builds a larger house, their neighbors feel pressure to build larger houses, and their neighbors feel pressure in turn. The cascade propagates outward, concentrating expenditure at the top and compressing it at the bottom.
The synchronization tax here is directionally asymmetric in a particularly vicious way, driven by the path of least thermodynamic resistance. A diffuse prior updating to a peaked posterior is mathematically cheap (it is rarely "surprised" by any specific outcome), while a peaked prior updating to a diffuse posterior is incredibly expensive (it views the alternatives as nearly impossible). The wealthy person's description of adequate consumption is sharply peaked around high levels, while the poorer person's description is more diffuse. Therefore, the KL divergence \(D_{\text{KL}}(p^{\text{rich}} | p^{\text{poor}})\) — the cost of the poor updating their diffuse prior to match the rich's peaked standard — is actually vastly smaller than the reverse. The poor can update cheaply — which is precisely why the cascade flows in their direction, along the path of least thermodynamic resistance. The expenditure cascade flows upward precisely because the wealthy are thermodynamically inflexible, forcing the diffuse party to absorb the synchronization burden.
Like a self-gravitating gas, an economy dominated by positional externalities can exhibit negative specific heat. Transferring resources from the "hot core" (wealthy agents) to the "cool envelope" (poor agents) doesn't equilibrate the system. The wealthy, having lost relative position, intensify their status competition. The poor, having gained resources, find their reference point has shifted upward. The temperature difference — inequality of felt deprivation — may actually increase. The system evolves away from equilibrium, just as Lynden-Bell and Wood predicted for self-gravitating matter.[16]
The gravo-thermal catastrophe has a known resolution in astrophysics: the core eventually becomes so dense that new physics intervenes — degeneracy pressure in white dwarfs, nuclear fusion in stars, event horizons in black holes. These are hard physical limits that halt the collapse. The economic analog would be institutional interventions that break the positive feedback loop — progressive taxation, luxury taxes, public goods that substitute for positional competition, norms that decouple status from consumption. North, Wallis, and Weingast's open access orders can be understood in this light as the institutional economics analog of the naked mole rat colony: systems that have socialized maintenance costs (through taxation and public institutions) and reduced the synchronization tax of coordination (through impersonal rules and common knowledge of institutional reliability). Open access orders don't eliminate the gravity of envy. They provide the degeneracy pressure — the institutional floor — that prevents the gravo-thermal catastrophe from collapsing social order entirely.
Brand's insight about deferred maintenance applies here with particular force. Open access institutions are expensive to maintain. Courts, regulatory agencies, public education, social insurance — all require continuous funding to preserve the shared descriptions on which impersonal trust depends. When societies defer this maintenance — through austerity, through privatization of public goods, through neglect of the institutional infrastructure that supports coordination — they are removing the degeneracy pressure that prevents social collapse. The roof doesn't cave in immediately. It caves in years later, after the accumulated neglect has weakened every joint.[17]
Law: Privacy as Maintenance
Judge Posner, in The Problems of Jurisprudence and in subsequent writings, offered a characteristically provocative account of privacy. On his view, privacy is primarily concealment — the hiding of information that, if revealed, would cause others not to want to deal with you. Privacy rights, on this account, impede efficient transactions by allowing people to withhold information that trading partners would find material. The efficient rule, Posner argued, would generally favor disclosure, because concealment introduces a friction into exchange that reduces total welfare.
The synchronization tax framework reframes this argument entirely.
In the framework developed here, privacy is not concealment. It is maintenance — the thermodynamic work of preventing internal descriptions from synchronizing with the external environment. The cell membrane that separates intracellular from extracellular is not "concealing" the cell's internal state from the environment. It is maintaining the boundary that makes the cell a distinct system capable of persisting far from equilibrium. A person who maintains private thoughts, private relationships, private spaces is doing the same work at a different scale: preserving the internal descriptions that constitute selfhood against environmental decoherence.[18]
Posner's account treats the firm or individual as a node in a transaction network and asks what information should flow to maximize network efficiency. This is coherent within NIE's framework, where the relevant costs are transaction costs between parties and the relevant goal is minimizing friction. But the synchronization tax framework reveals a cost that Posner's analysis omits: the anti-synchronization cost — the thermodynamic work that the firm or individual must perform to remain a distinct system in the first place. A person who cannot maintain private descriptions — who is fully transparent to the environment — has no internal structure left to protect. Their observational entropy approaches that of the environment. They cease to be a distinguishable agent. Full transparency is not just inefficient; it is thermodynamically equivalent to dissolution.
This doesn't mean all privacy is justified. Some concealment genuinely does impede efficient coordination, exactly as Posner argues. A seller hiding a known defect raises the synchronization tax that the buyer must pay to form an accurate description of the transaction. Fraud is the deliberate manipulation of another party's description for private advantage — an artificial inflation of the synchronization tax. The framework distinguishes between maintenance (preserving internal coherence) and manipulation (distorting another's descriptions), a distinction that Posner's account conflates by treating all concealment as functionally equivalent.
The legal implications extend to consumer protection and market structure. When a platform controls the description through which transactions occur — when every user must synchronize their preferences, their language, their categories to the platform's representation — the platform imposes an asymmetric synchronization burden on its users. The platform's description doesn't adjust to the user; the user adjusts to the platform. This asymmetry is not merely a market power concern in the antitrust sense. It is a structural feature of any system where one party's description is institutionally embedded and the other party's is not.
Ben Thompson and John Collison explored a version of this dynamic on their Cheeky Pint podcast, discussing how payment platforms mediate the description of transactions between merchants and consumers. Their conversation illuminated a point that the synchronization tax framework makes precise: the party that controls the transactional description controls the terms of coordination, and that control is a form of power distinct from (though correlated with) market share. Consumer protection law, on this reading, is not primarily about correcting information asymmetries — though it does that — but about ensuring that the synchronization burden of commercial transactions is distributed in ways that preserve the consumer's capacity to maintain their own description of what they need, what they're getting, and what they're paying. When consumer protection fails, the consumer's description is overwritten by the merchant's or the platform's, and the consumer loses the ability to evaluate the transaction on their own terms — an informational injury that compounds the material one.[19]
Literature: Possession and the Stakes of Common Knowledge
[Spoiler Alert: Skip this section if you are reading or want to read the book.]
A. S. Byatt's Possession — winner of the 1990 Booker Prize — is, among many other things, a sustained meditation on what happens when private descriptions become common knowledge, and on what is lost in the transition.
The novel follows two contemporary academics, Roland Michell and Maud Bailey, as they discover a secret correspondence between two Victorian poets — Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte. The letters reveal a passionate love affair that neither poet's published work acknowledges. The entire narrative engine runs on a question the synchronization tax framework renders precise: What changes when what was privately known becomes commonly known?
The letters exist. The affair happened. In one sense, the facts are fixed regardless of who reads them. But Byatt shows with extraordinary care that the descriptions change everything. While the letters remain private — sealed in a box, known only to the dead — they carry one kind of meaning. The poets' internal descriptions of their experience are preserved intact, uncorrupted by the interpretive machinery of posterity. Ash's tenderness, LaMotte's intellectual ferocity, the child they conceived — all these exist in a private description that answers to no external audience.
The contemporary scholars' discovery initiates a synchronization event. Roland and Maud must build a shared description of the correspondence — they must pay the synchronization tax of aligning their different interpretive frameworks (his biographical, hers feminist-theoretical) around the same textual evidence. But this pairwise synchronization, costly as it is, remains intimate. The truly catastrophic costs arrive when the letters threaten to become common knowledge — when rival scholars, institutional archives, media attention, and academic politics demand that the private description be synchronized with the descriptive apparatus of the entire scholarly community.
Byatt dramatizes the maintenance costs of privacy with devastating clarity. The descendants who have guarded the letters, the sealed rooms, the deliberate omissions in published biographies — all represent ongoing expenditures of effort and attention to prevent internal descriptions from leaking into the environment. These are anti-synchronization costs in the precise sense developed above. And when those costs can no longer be paid — when the scholars breach the tomb in the novel's climax — what spills out is not merely "information" in the Shannon sense. It is the destruction of a private description, an event as thermodynamically irreversible as the opening of a sealed chamber to the atmosphere.
The novel's deepest insight, for our purposes, is that the view from inside matters. Ash and LaMotte's experience of their affair — the felt texture of their love, their anguish, their creative entanglement — is not recoverable from the public description that the scholars construct. The public description is necessarily a coarse-graining: it captures broad features (they had an affair, they had a child, LaMotte suffered) while losing the fine-grained internal structure that constituted the actual experience. The observational entropy of the scholars' description is higher than the observational entropy of the poets' lived experience — more is unknown, more is averaged out, more is lost to the coarse-graining that publicity requires.
This is not a failure of scholarship. It is a thermodynamic necessity. Every act of synchronization compresses private descriptions into shared ones, and that compression is lossy. What Byatt mourns — and what makes the novel's final pages so moving — is not that the scholars got anything wrong, but that the transition from private to common knowledge destroyed something irreplaceable: the coherence of a description that answered only to itself. The poets' love existed in a low-entropy state precisely because it was maintained against the environment. When the maintenance ceased, the description decohered — not into falsehood, but into a higher-entropy public account that, while true in its broad features, could never recover what the private description contained.[20]
Prescriptions
The synchronization tax is a physical quantity — measurable, irreducible, and subject to identifiable asymmetries. Its distribution is not fixed by physics. Physics sets the floor; humans choose who stands on it.
Three prescriptions follow, ordered from abstract to concrete. The first identifies a fixed point in the ethical landscape. The second explains why individuals have self-interested reasons to maintain the organizations that sustain them. The third addresses how synchronization burdens should be distributed — and what happens when the energy budget changes.
The Golden Rule as Fixed Point
Section 1 established that optimizing for the sum of both parties' thermodynamic work always yields a geometric midpoint \(M\) that is mathematically cheaper than total capitulation by either party:
This result has a normative consequence that deserves to be stated plainly. In any pairwise interaction, the total thermodynamic cost of coordination is minimized when both parties update toward a shared geometric overlap rather than one party bearing the full burden.
The Golden Rule — treat others as you would have them treat you — prescribes exactly this. It instructs each party to adopt the other's perspective before acting, which in the language of the synchronization tax means: do not impose a massive, one-sided KL divergence when mutual adjustment minimizes total systemic friction. The instruction is ancient because the problem is ancient. Every interaction between systems with different descriptions faces the question of who adjusts, and the Golden Rule answers: both, mutually.
What makes the Golden Rule a fixed point rather than merely a good idea is that it satisfies a stability condition—provided power is relatively equal. If both parties hold symmetric optionality, neither has an incentive to deviate, because deviating means accepting a higher total cost to shift the burden. A party that defects from symmetric updating gains locally but increases the total systemic expenditure, compounding future friction. The Golden Rule is a stable Nash equilibrium between equals.
However, this stability shatters when power is profoundly asymmetric. If a massive tech platform forces a user to synchronize to its API, defection from symmetry is not self-penalizing for the platform; the platform saves immense energy by externalizing the cost entirely onto the user. True symmetric equilibria therefore require either equal power or institutional enforcement to prevent the powerful from routing around the Golden Rule.[21]
This connects to a deeper mathematical fact. The normalized geometric mean \(M \propto \sqrt{p^A p^B}\) is the unique target that minimizes the sum of divergences from both prior states. It finds the optimal overlap in information-geometric space. Any other target distribution favors one party's description over the other's, introducing an asymmetry that inflates the total cost.
The Golden Rule does not say that both parties should end up believing the same thing. It says that the process of coordination should be symmetric — that neither party's description should be treated as noise to be overwritten. The midpoint \(M\) preserves information from both sources. It is a mixture, not a collapse.
Kant's categorical imperative arrives at a similar destination by a different route. Kant asks: can you universalize your maxim without contradiction? A maxim that says "I will impose my description on others while refusing to update my own" cannot be universalized — if everyone followed it, no coordination would occur, because every party would refuse to update. The only universalizable coordination norm is symmetric updating: each party adjusts toward the other. Kant arrives at the same symmetric-updating norm from logical rather than thermodynamic premises.
There is a limit, and it is important. The Golden Rule is a fixed point for pairwise interactions. Not all interactions are pairwise, and not all asymmetries are unjust. The doctor's sharply peaked diagnostic model and the patient's diffuse experiential description occupy different positions in information space, and forcing the doctor to abandon clinical categories in favor of the patient's phenomenology would destroy useful structure. The prescription is not "always symmetrize" but "symmetrize by default, and justify asymmetries when they are necessary." The burden of justification falls on whoever imposes the asymmetry — a point to which I will return.
Individual Benefits of Preserving the Organization
Why should anyone pay the costs of maintaining an organization that constrains them?
Organizations impose real costs on their members — synchronization taxes at every internal interaction, maintenance burdens shared through dues or taxes, anti-synchronization costs that restrict what members can say or do. A rational individual might wonder whether the benefits of membership exceed these costs, and if not, why not defect.
The answer requires Hamilton's Rule, read through a thermodynamic lens.
Hamilton showed that altruistic behavior evolves when \(rB > C\) — when the benefit \(B\) to the recipient, weighted by the relatedness \(r\) between actor and recipient, exceeds the cost \(C\) to the actor. In the standard biological interpretation, \(r\) measures genetic relatedness: the probability that actor and recipient share a given allele by common descent. This is why eusociality in naked mole rats works — \(r\) approaches unity, so even costly behaviors satisfy the inequality easily.
But Hamilton's Rule can be read more broadly. In the synchronization tax framework, \(r\) measures the overlap between two systems' descriptions — the degree to which preserving the other system's organization also preserves your own. Genetic relatedness is one mechanism that produces high \(r\), but it is not the only one. Shared training, shared language, shared institutional context, shared professional norms — all create overlap between individual descriptions and the organizational description that contains them.
When a lawyer maintains the legal system by following precedent even when defection would serve a particular client, the lawyer preserves a shared description — the predictability of legal outcomes — that the lawyer's own practice depends on. The cost \(C\) of compliance is real (a particular case is lost or compromised). The benefit \(B\) of the preserved institution is diffuse (all future interactions within the legal system proceed more cheaply). But \(r\) is high: the lawyer's professional description substantially overlaps with the legal system's description. The lawyer's skills, reputation, and livelihood are encoded in terms that the legal system defines. To let the system degrade is to let one's own description decohere.
This is not altruism in the colloquial sense. It is self-interest correctly computed over the full description. The individual who defects from institutional maintenance saves the local cost but accepts the degradation of the shared description in which their own coherence is embedded. The savings are immediate and visible; the degradation is slow and diffuse — which is why defection is tempting and why institutional decay proceeds by increments rather than catastrophe.[22]
Computational work on kin and group selection models supports this reading. In using Rademacher Complexity to compare the explanatory power of kin selection and group selection models, it seems to be the case that kin selection models consistently achieved lower complexity while retaining equivalent predictive power — they captured the essential dynamics with fewer degrees of freedom. A subsequent causal analysis using Pearl's framework and sensitivity analysis confirmed that relatedness, not grouping per se, drives the causal arrow toward cooperative behavior. Simply forcing individuals into groups — ecological pressure without shared description — fails to produce stable cooperation. The association between grouping and altruism turned out to be so fragile that even a single unobserved confounder could explain it away.
The implication for human institutions is precise, and it echoes the conclusion of that earlier work: competition between groups selects for groups that have successfully engineered high "cultural relatedness" — that have, in effect, hacked the ancient algorithm of kin selection to operate at the scale of organizations and nations. Organizations sustain cooperation not by forcing proximity (grouping) but by constructing shared descriptions (cultural relatedness). The onboarding costs that Coase's theory of the firm implies — the synchronization tax of bringing a new member into alignment with the firm's internal description — are the mechanism by which \(r\) is raised from near-zero (strangers) to a level where Hamilton's inequality is satisfied. Once \(r\) is high enough, maintaining the organization becomes individually rational because the member's own description is now substantially encoded in the organization's terms.[23]
There is a dark side. When \(r\) becomes too high — when the individual's description is entirely subsumed by the organization's — the member loses the capacity for independent evaluation. This is the pathology of total institutions, cults, and ideological capture: the individual cannot defect because defection would mean losing not just membership but selfhood. The naked mole rat colony achieves extraordinary efficiency through near-total overlap of individual and colony descriptions, but the price is individual reproductive autonomy. Human institutions that approach this limit — through indoctrination, isolation, or the systematic destruction of members' external ties — achieve efficiency at the cost of the diversity that makes adaptation possible.
The prescription is therefore not to maximize \(r\) but to manage it. Healthy institutions maintain enough overlap between individual and organizational descriptions to satisfy Hamilton's inequality — enough that members find it individually rational to pay maintenance costs — while preserving enough divergence that members retain the capacity to recognize when the organization itself needs updating. This is the institutional analog of the biological tradeoff between efficiency and adaptability that the naked mole rat has resolved in one extreme direction. Open access orders, at their best, resolve it differently: enough shared description to sustain impersonal trust, enough individual divergence to sustain innovation and correction.[24]
Symmetrization
Section 2 established that symmetric coordination is always cheaper in pairwise interactions, that asymmetry is sometimes necessary at institutional scale, and that the feasibility of symmetrization depends on the available energy budget. These are descriptive claims. The prescriptive question is: given these constraints, how should the synchronization burden be distributed?
Three principles follow from the framework.
First: symmetry as default, asymmetry as exception. Because the sum \(\leq \min(D_{\text{KL}})\) is symmetric, the party that imposes an asymmetric synchronization burden is always imposing a higher total cost than necessary. This asymmetry may be justified — the doctor's diagnostic categories, the state's legal vocabulary, the platform's data schema — but the justification must appeal to some benefit that the asymmetry produces, a benefit large enough to offset the thermodynamic surplus. The burden of proof falls on whoever benefits from the asymmetry, not on whoever bears it.[25]
This reverses a widespread default. In practice, the party that bears the synchronization burden — the patient, the citizen, the user — is expected to justify their complaint. "Why can't you fill out the form correctly?" "Why don't you understand the terms of service?" The synchronization tax framework says: the form is the anomaly, not the person. Every form, every interface, every institutional procedure that requires civilians to compress their experience into bureaucratic categories imposes a thermodynamic cost. That cost may be justified, but it requires justification — not the other way around.
Second: transparency of asymmetry. When asymmetric synchronization is necessary, the asymmetry should be visible and as legible as possible. Hidden asymmetries — platform algorithms that shape user descriptions without disclosing their operations, legal frameworks whose complexity makes them legible only to specialists, financial instruments whose risks are opaque to one counterparty — compound the thermodynamic cost with an informational injury. The party bearing the synchronization burden cannot even evaluate whether the asymmetry is justified if the asymmetry itself is concealed.
This principle has teeth in the context of AI governance. When an AI system mediates interactions — pricing goods, screening applicants, recommending content — it imposes a synchronization burden on every human who must translate their preferences into the system's categories. The question is not whether this burden exists (it does) but whether it is visible, and whether the humans bearing it have any recourse. Shahidi et al.'s concern about "steering" and "lock-in" in AI agent platforms names exactly this problem: a hidden asymmetry in who bears the synchronization cost.[26]
Third: compensation for irreducible asymmetry. Where asymmetric synchronization is both necessary and transparent, the party that bears the disproportionate burden should be compensated — not necessarily in money, but in reduced burden elsewhere. Progressive taxation is one mechanism: citizens who bear the highest synchronization costs in their interactions with the state (because their situations are most poorly served by standard categories) receive transfers that offset some of the material consequences. Universal basic services are another: public education, healthcare, and legal aid reduce the synchronization burden on individuals by providing pre-synchronized interfaces — professionals trained to bridge the gap between institutional categories and individual experience.[27]
The Energy Budget and the Scope of Symmetry
The three principles above — symmetry as default, transparency, compensation — describe what we should aim for. What we can afford to aim for depends on the energy budget, a constraint whose implications Section 2 began to develop and which the prescriptive context makes more urgent.
Open access orders are high-maintenance structures. Courts, contracts, regulatory agencies, public education — all require continuous energy expenditure to maintain the shared descriptions on which impersonal trust depends. Symmetric synchronization norms cost more than asymmetric ones — they cost more because they preserve both parties' descriptions rather than overwriting one. A society can afford widespread symmetrization only when its energy budget supports the maintenance.
This constraint cuts in several directions simultaneously.
First, it explains why democratic governance correlates historically with energy abundance — and why energy scarcity threatens democratic institutions before it threatens autocratic ones. An autocracy can function on a lean energy budget because it operates on asymmetric synchronization: the state's description prevails, and citizens bear the full cost of adjustment. A democracy requires the energy to maintain symmetric norms — elections, due process, freedom of expression, all of which are expensive precisely because they require institutional infrastructure that respects both parties' descriptions rather than privileging one.
Second, it lends urgency to the expansion of energy supply. Not merely for economic growth or material comfort, but for the preservation of symmetric coordination norms that constitute human dignity in the specific sense developed here. Building more nuclear fission and fusion capacity, more solar, more of every energy source that does not simultaneously destroy the environment on which all descriptions depend — these are not merely economic investments. They are investments in the thermodynamic feasibility of treating people as ends rather than means. Kant's moral philosophy acquires a power bill.[28]
Third, it explains a limit. In the limit of asymptotic freedom from energy constraints — if fusion or some successor technology makes energy effectively unlimited — the synchronization tax transforms from a scarcity to be managed into a complexity to be cultivated. In that limit, we would not choose maximum efficiency (which collapses all descriptions into one) but maximum diversity of maintained descriptions, linked by the richest possible web of symmetric synchronizations. The thermodynamic footprint of individualism, which today is a luxury constrained by energy budgets, would become the purpose of the system rather than its cost. We would spend energy to maintain divergence — to keep descriptions distinct, to prevent the homogenization that efficiency alone would drive.
This is the vision — distant, speculative, but I think worth naming. A world in which the synchronization tax is not a burden to be minimized but a medium through which distinct perspectives sustain each other. Not the naked mole rat's solution of collapsing all descriptions into one, but its opposite: a world in which the maintenance of difference is the highest-energy, most worthwhile expenditure a civilization can make. A world, in Byatt's terms, where every private description that matters can afford the maintenance costs of remaining private — and where the decision to share is made freely, not forced by the inability to pay the cost of coherence.
Open Questions
The framework presented here is incomplete. Several problems remain that I cannot resolve and do not wish to paper over.
Measuring the Tax
The synchronization tax is defined mathematically — KL divergence between descriptions, bounded below by Landauer's principle — but measuring it in practice requires identifying the descriptions themselves. For a photon hitting a detector, the descriptions are well-characterized quantum states and the tax can, in principle, be computed exactly. For two firms negotiating a contract, the descriptions are probability distributions over vast spaces of possible terms, expectations, and interpretive frameworks, and no one has measured them.
This is not a problem unique to this framework. Transaction costs, despite decades of theoretical development, remain notoriously difficult to measure directly — economists typically infer them from organizational choices rather than observing them. The synchronization tax inherits this difficulty and adds another: even where the relevant descriptions can be specified, the KL divergence between them requires knowing both distributions, and at least one party's distribution is typically private.
There are promising directions. Laboratory experiments in which subjects coordinate under controlled conditions — with descriptions that can be elicited through mechanism design — could provide direct measurements of synchronization costs and test the predicted relationship between description divergence and coordination expense.[29] Natural experiments in which institutional changes alter the synchronization burden (a new regulatory framework, a platform redesign, a shift in professional standards) could measure downstream effects. The gravo-thermal analogy in economics generates specific predictions about the relationship between inequality, positional spending, and institutional stability that should be empirically distinguishable from standard accounts. None of this work has been done. Until it has, the framework remains a theoretical lens whose empirical magnification has not been calibrated.
Who Chooses the Description?
The framework takes descriptions — coarse-grainings, probability distributions over macrostates — as given. But in any social context, the choice of description is itself a political act. When a census bureau decides which racial categories to offer, when a diagnostic manual defines which symptom clusters constitute a disease, when a platform determines which user attributes to track — each is choosing the coarse-graining through which subsequent synchronization will occur. The synchronization tax depends on the descriptions, but the descriptions are not thermodynamically determined. They emerge from history, power, convention, and accident.
There is a circularity here that the framework does not resolve. The synchronization tax measures the cost of aligning descriptions, but the choice of which descriptions to align is prior to the tax and partly determines its magnitude. A bureaucracy that defines its categories well — in ways that map naturally onto the diversity of cases it encounters — imposes a lower synchronization tax than one whose categories are arbitrary or outdated. But "defines its categories well" is exactly the problem. The framework identifies the cost of bad descriptions (high synchronization tax, lossy compression, informational indignity) without providing a general procedure for choosing good ones.
This connects to a point Sunstein makes about incompletely theorized agreements. Good institutional descriptions are not fully specified. They leave room for interpretation, for local adaptation, for the kind of constructive ambiguity that allows systems with genuinely different models to coordinate without fully resolving their disagreements. The choice of description, in other words, is itself a coordination problem — one that the framework can illuminate but not solve.
Multi-Party Synchronization and Scaling
The formal treatment in Section 2 is pairwise. Two systems, two descriptions, one KL divergence or geometric mean. But the applications in Sections 5 and 6 involve organizations — systems with hundreds or thousands of members, each carrying a distinct description. The combinatorial explosion of pairwise interactions (\(n\) agents generate \(\binom{n}{2}\) pairs) is mentioned but not formally analyzed.
Multi-party generalizations of the geometric mean exist — the mathematics extend naturally to weighted mixtures of multiple distributions — but the organizational implications of this scaling are not well understood. How does the synchronization tax scale with group size for different organizational topologies? A hierarchy, in which most synchronization flows through a central node, presumably scales differently from a flat network in which every pair synchronizes directly. Coase's theory of the firm implies that the hierarchical solution dominates when the centralized description is sufficiently good, but "sufficiently good" has not been given a precise information-theoretic characterization.
Related: the three-part decomposition (transmission, synchronization, maintenance) may interact in ways that a pairwise analysis cannot capture. Maintenance costs in a large organization may depend not only on the rate of environmental perturbation but on the topology of internal synchronization — the structure of who talks to whom, how often, and through what channels. Brand's shearing layers suggest that different organizational components require different maintenance frequencies, and the cost of mismatching maintenance to decay rate may be nonlinear. A formal model of multi-party synchronization with heterogeneous maintenance requirements would be valuable and does not yet exist.
The Normative Gap
The prescriptions in Section 6 derive ethical claims from thermodynamic facts. The geometric inequality becomes the Golden Rule. The energy budget constrains the scope of democratic governance. Positional externalities impose real thermodynamic costs on third parties, grounding Frank's consumption tax proposal in physics rather than preferences.
This is-ought bridge deserves more scrutiny than I have given it. The geometric mean is a minimum-cost solution, but not every minimum-cost solution is morally obligatory. Efficiency and justice are different values, and they can conflict. A slave economy is thermodynamically "efficient" in the narrow sense that it imposes synchronization costs asymmetrically — the enslaved bear the full burden — without wasting energy on symmetric coordination. The framework identifies this as costly (the total expenditure exceeds the symmetric minimum) and as a form of informational indignity, but whether those observations entail a moral prohibition requires ethical premises that thermodynamics alone does not supply.
What the framework does supply is a cost accounting that moral reasoning can draw on. It reveals hidden costs (the informational indignity of forced synchronization), identifies structural features (the self-reinforcing character of asymmetric power), and connects local interactions to systemic dynamics (the gravo-thermal catastrophe, deferred maintenance). These are inputs to moral reasoning, not substitutes for it. The claim is not that physics determines ethics, but that ethics conducted in ignorance of the physical costs of coordination will systematically misjudge which arrangements are sustainable and which are not.
Consciousness and the View from Inside
The framework repeatedly invokes the "view from inside" — the felt texture of private descriptions, the informational indignity of forced synchronization, the loss that Byatt dramatizes when private knowledge becomes public. These claims assume that internal descriptions carry a subjective character — that there is something it is like to have a rich, structured model of the world, and that this something matters.
The framework does not explain consciousness. It does suggest a structural correlation: systems with lower observational entropy (more structured descriptions, richer internal models) face higher potential synchronization costs and have more to lose from forced transparency. Whether this structural correlation maps onto subjective experience — whether the richness of a system's internal description tracks the richness of its felt experience — is an open question that the framework cannot answer but that its prescriptions implicitly depend on.
Goldstein's mattering instinct is, in this light, a claim about the relationship between description and experience: that systems with rich internal descriptions experience something — the sense of mattering — that is injured when those descriptions are ignored or overwritten. If this claim is correct, the synchronization tax framework provides a precise account of the mechanism by which the injury occurs. If it is not correct — if subjective experience is unrelated to descriptive structure — then the normative force of the framework's prescriptions about dignity and symmetry diminishes. The question remains genuinely open, and the framework's ethical reach depends on its answer.
Conclusion
The gap that my children's gentle admonitions helped me see turns out to be wide.
The synchronization tax is the thermodynamic cost of resolving divergence between two systems' descriptions — the work that one or both must perform to bring their models into local agreement. It is real, measurable, bounded from below by Landauer's principle, and intrinsically asymmetric. But it is only one component of what organizations must pay to exist.
Maintenance — the continuous work of preserving shared descriptions against entropic drift, environmental decoherence, and internal decay — is the second cost, the one that Brand sees in buildings and that biology pays in metabolic energy and that every CISO's budget accounts for in encryption and access controls. Anti-synchronization — the thermodynamic work of preventing private descriptions from leaking into the environment — is maintenance's inward-facing twin: the cell membrane, the sealed letter, the privacy right.
Transmission, synchronization, maintenance. Shannon's domain, Landauer's domain, Brand's domain. Three costs, each irreducible in its own way, each operating at every scale from photon detectors to democratic institutions.
The framework that emerges from this decomposition connects phenomena that are normally treated in isolation. Transaction costs in economics, privacy in law, eusociality in biology, positional externalities in sociology, the institutional correlates of energy abundance in political science — all turn out to be aspects of the same underlying cost structure, visible from different angles and at different scales. The naked mole rat and the open access order are both solutions to the same problem: how to manage the total costs of maintaining coherence in a world that relentlessly pulls toward incoherence.
Whether these connections hold up under empirical scrutiny remains to be seen. The framework generates specific, testable predictions — about the relationship between description divergence and coordination cost, about the scaling of synchronization tax with organizational topology, about the thermodynamic preconditions for democratic governance — that have not yet been tested. The normative bridge from thermodynamic efficiency to moral prescription requires ethical premises that the physics alone does not supply. The choice of description, the most consequential variable in the framework, lies partly outside its scope.
What the framework does offer is a language for talking about costs that have been real but nameless. The informational indignity of forced synchronization. The hidden subsidy of socialized maintenance. The self-reinforcing asymmetry of descriptive power. The institutional degeneracy pressure that prevents social collapse. The thermodynamic footprint of treating people as ends rather than means.
Fred Rogers, I think, knew all of this without the mathematics. He knew that the world's worth depends on people feeling worthwhile, that this feeling depends on people's descriptions of themselves being treated as signal rather than noise, and that maintaining the conditions under which this treatment is possible requires continuous, quiet, often invisible work. That maintaining coherence — one's own and others' — is the work that matters.
The maintenance of difference. The preservation of what the view from inside contains. The decision to spend energy keeping descriptions distinct rather than collapsing them into a single, efficient, impoverished consensus.
This is, I think, the mattering project. Not a theory to be completed but a practice to be sustained.
[This essay was prepared with assistance and feedback from Claude Opus 4.6 and Gemini 3 Pro Deep Think. I am grateful to both.]
Šafránek, D., Deutsch, J. M., & Aguirre, A. (2019). "Quantum coarse-grained entropy and thermodynamics." Physical Review A, 99(1), 010101. See also Šafránek, D., Aguirre, A., Schindler, J., & Deutsch, J. M. (2021). "A brief introduction to observational entropy." Foundations of Physics, 51(5), 101. ↩︎
Landauer, R. (1961). "Irreversibility and heat generation in the computing process." IBM Journal of Research and Development, 5(3), 183–191. Landauer showed that erasing one bit of information requires at minimum \(k_B T \ln 2\) of energy dissipated as heat. Resolving a disagreement between two descriptions — updating one to match the other — involves erasing the prior description, and the energy cost scales with the KL divergence between them. ↩︎
Shahidi, P., Rusak, G., Manning, B. S., Fradkin, A., & Horton, J. J. (2025). "The Coasean Singularity? Demand, Supply, and Market Design with AI Agents." In The Economics of Transformative AI, Chapter 6. University of Chicago Press. NBER Working Paper No. 34468. ↩︎ ↩︎
Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press. ↩︎
The Fred Rogers Institute at Saint Vincent College preserves Rogers's philosophy and methods. See fredrogersinstitute.org. ↩︎
North, D. C., Wallis, J. J., & Weingast, B. R. (2009). Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge University Press. ↩︎
This dynamic is explored with characteristic precision in Brand's discussion of "deferred maintenance" in public infrastructure. The phrase itself is a euphemism for borrowing against the future — consuming the shared description's coherence today and hoping someone else pays to restore it tomorrow. ↩︎
Coase, R. H. (1937). "The Nature of the Firm." Economica, 4(16), 386–405. Williamson, O. E. (1985). The Economic Institutions of Capitalism. Free Press. Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press. ↩︎
Williamson, O. E. (1979). "Transaction-Cost Economics: The Governance of Contractual Relations." Journal of Law and Economics, 22(2), 233–261. His concept of "credible commitments" as safeguards against opportunism addresses a related but distinct problem: how to make promises believable, not how to keep internal channels from leaking. ↩︎
Grant, R. M. (1996). "Toward a Knowledge-Based Theory of the Firm." Strategic Management Journal, 17(Winter Special Issue), 109–122. Kogut, B., & Zander, U. (1992). "Knowledge of the Firm, Combinative Capabilities, and the Replication of Technology." Organization Science, 3(3), 383–397. ↩︎
Barzel, Y. (1982). "Measurement Cost and the Organization of Markets." Journal of Law and Economics, 25(1), 27–48. See also Barzel, Y. (1997). Economic Analysis of Property Rights. Cambridge University Press. ↩︎
Jarvis, J. U. M. (1981). "Eusociality in a Mammal: Cooperative Breeding in Naked Mole-Rat Colonies." Science, 212(4494), 571–573. This paper established the first confirmed case of eusociality in mammals. The parallels with eusocial insects had been predicted by entomologist Richard Alexander in 1974 based on ecological reasoning alone — a prediction confirmed when Jarvis demonstrated that naked mole rat colonies exhibit reproductive division of labor, cooperative brood care, and overlapping generations. ↩︎
Yahav, S., & Buffenstein, R. (1991). "Huddling Behavior Facilitates Homeothermy in the Naked Mole Rat Heterocephalus glaber." Physiological Zoology, 64(3), 871–884. The paper demonstrates that isolated naked mole rats cannot thermoregulate, but groups achieve "behavioral homeothermy" through communal huddling — a striking example of maintenance costs being socialized within the colony. ↩︎
The analogy between eusocial colonies and institutions has limits that deserve flagging. Naked mole rat colonies achieve low synchronization costs through genetic identity — their descriptions agree because they are copies. Human institutions achieve coordination through constructed common knowledge — shared descriptions that must be continuously maintained despite genetic and experiential diversity. The naked mole rat solution sacrifices adaptability for efficiency. Human institutions, at their best, preserve diversity while managing the synchronization costs it imposes. The institutional challenge is harder precisely because the synchronization tax is higher. ↩︎
Lynden-Bell, D., & Wood, R. (1968). "The Gravo-Thermal Catastrophe in Isothermal Spheres and the Onset of Red-Giant Structure for Stellar Systems." Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 138(4), 495–525. The paper demonstrates that self-gravitating systems enclosed in a rigid boundary evolve away from thermal equilibrium when centrally condensed beyond a critical ratio — a result that violates the assumptions of standard thermodynamics because the long-range gravitational interaction creates correlations that prevent the usual approach to equilibrium. ↩︎
Robert Frank develops the positional externality argument most fully in Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class (2007) and Under the Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work (2020). René Girard's theory of mimetic desire, developed across Violence and the Sacred (1972) and Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978), provides the anthropological substrate for Frank's economic analysis. The connection between mimetic desire and self-gravitating systems is, to my knowledge, novel. The stimulus to making the connection for me was a beautiful blog post by John Carlos Baez. ↩︎
This is also the context in which to read Paul Bloom's recent essay on psychological fragmentation and its social consequences. When institutions that maintain shared descriptions degrade — when courts lose legitimacy, when media fragment into competing epistemic bubbles, when common knowledge of shared facts dissolves — individuals lose the external scaffolding that supports coherent self-description. The mattering instinct, deprived of a social context in which mattering can be recognized, turns inward or destructive. I observed in a comment on Bloom's essay that this fragmentation is itself a kind of deferred maintenance — a failure to pay the ongoing costs of preserving the shared descriptions on which individual coherence depends. ↩︎
The connection between privacy and biological maintenance extends further than metaphor. The immune system is a privacy mechanism — it maintains a description of "self" and attacks anything that doesn't match. Autoimmune diseases are failures of this anti-synchronization: the immune system's description of self becomes corrupted, and it begins destroying the very internal structure it evolved to protect. The legal system's privacy protections serve an analogous function at the social scale: maintaining the boundary between internal and external descriptions that constitutes individual agency. ↩︎
Thompson and Collison's conversation also touched on the dynamics of payment processing as infrastructure. In the synchronization tax framework, payment processors are maintenance institutions — they preserve the shared description of "what was exchanged for what" against degradation, fraud, and dispute. The processing fee is, in part, a maintenance cost. The question of who bears that cost and who controls the description it preserves is a question about the distribution of synchronization burden in commercial life. ↩︎
Byatt's novel resonates with a point Pinker makes in When Everyone Knows that Everyone Knows: the irreversibility of common knowledge creation. Once something becomes common knowledge, it cannot be un-known. The emperor, once publicly declared naked, cannot restore the pretense of clothedness. What Byatt adds to Pinker's analysis is the felt cost of this irreversibility — the grief that accompanies the transformation of private knowledge into public description, even when the public description is accurate. ↩︎
The game-theoretic framing connects to Axelrod's (1984) The Evolution of Cooperation, which demonstrated through tournament simulations that tit-for-tat — a strategy that begins cooperatively and mirrors the other player's previous move — outperforms both pure cooperation and pure defection in iterated prisoner's dilemmas. Tit-for-tat is a symmetric-geometric-mean-approximating strategy: it defaults to symmetric treatment and imposes asymmetry only in response to the other party's asymmetry. The thermodynamic interpretation adds a layer: defection is not merely strategically unwise but energetically wasteful, because it increases the total synchronization cost that both parties must eventually pay. ↩︎
This argument has a Burkean flavor that deserves acknowledgment. Edmund Burke's defense of inherited institutions rested partly on the claim that individuals cannot fully perceive the benefits of institutions they have not built — that the "latent wisdom" of evolved social forms exceeds any individual's capacity to evaluate them. The synchronization tax framework gives this intuition a precise form: the shared descriptions encoded in institutions represent thermodynamic investments that are cheaper to maintain than to rebuild. But Burke's argument, taken to its limit, becomes a license for stasis. The framework here cuts both ways — it explains why maintenance is rational, but also why the capacity to evaluate and update institutions must itself be maintained. ↩︎
The connection between Hamilton's Rule and institutional membership echoes the formal equivalence between kin selection and group selection that Jonathan Birch (2019) develops through the concept of "K-G space". Birch shows that kin and group selection are not rival hypotheses but endpoints of a continuum parameterized by population structure. In the synchronization tax framework, this continuum maps to the degree of description overlap: high overlap (genetic or cultural) makes individual and organizational descriptions nearly interchangeable, reducing synchronization costs within the group while potentially increasing them between groups. The continuum, not the endpoints, is where most human institutions live. ↩︎
Elinor Ostrom's work on commons governance is instructive here. Ostrom (1990) documented communities that successfully managed shared resources without either privatization or state control — through locally evolved rules that balanced individual access against collective maintenance. These communities achieved an intermediate \(r\): enough shared description to sustain cooperation, enough individual autonomy to sustain adaptive management. Her "design principles" for long-enduring commons institutions — clearly defined boundaries, proportional equivalence between benefits and costs, collective-choice arrangements, monitoring, graduated sanctions — read as a practical manual for managing the synchronization tax at community scale. ↩︎
This principle has a direct legal analog in the concept of strict scrutiny in constitutional law. When the state imposes a burden on a fundamental right, the state must demonstrate that the burden serves a compelling interest and is narrowly tailored to achieve that interest. The synchronization tax framework extends this logic beyond rights discourse: any asymmetric synchronization burden should require justification proportional to its magnitude, because every such asymmetry imposes a thermodynamic cost above the symmetric minimum. ↩︎
Shahidi, P., Rusak, G., Manning, B. S., Fradkin, A., & Horton, J. J. (2025). "The Coasean Singularity? Demand, Supply, and Market Design with AI Agents." In The Economics of Transformative AI, Chapter 6. University of Chicago Press. The paper's distinction between "bring-your-own" and "bowling-shoe" AI agents is a distinction about who controls the description through which transactions occur — and therefore who bears the synchronization cost of translating between private preferences and transactional categories. ↩︎
Amartya Sen's capability approach provides a complementary framework. Sen (1999) argues in Development as Freedom that development should be measured not by GDP but by the substantive freedoms — capabilities — available to individuals. In synchronization tax terms, capabilities are pre-synchronized interfaces: a literate person has already paid the synchronization cost of learning to read, and every future interaction that requires literacy is cheaper as a result. Public investment in capabilities is investment in reducing the synchronization burden on individuals — front-loading the cost so that each subsequent interaction is more symmetric. ↩︎
The connection between energy and democratic governance deserves empirical investigation of its own. The claim here is not that energy abundance causes democracy (many energy-rich states are autocratic) but that energy abundance is a necessary condition for sustaining symmetric coordination norms at scale. The resource curse literature — particularly Ross (2001) and subsequent work — suggests that the form in which energy is available matters as much as the quantity. Concentrated energy sources (oil, gas) can sustain asymmetric power structures; distributed energy sources (solar, wind) may favor distributed governance. This is speculative but directionally consistent with the framework. ↩︎
One could imagine laboratory games in which two subjects with different prior beliefs about some question (elicited through standard belief-elicitation mechanisms) must reach agreement, with the synchronization cost measured in terms of the time, cognitive effort, and concessions required to converge. The predicted relationship — that cost scales with the KL divergence between elicited priors — is directly testable. Field studies of organizational mergers, in which pre-merger cultural surveys could proxy for "description divergence," offer a natural setting for testing the predicted relationship between description distance and integration cost. ↩︎