The New Social Contract

Chapter 12 closed on an organization that had forgotten what control once meant. Drift had reshaped what an institution was, what it knew, what it could do, and the people inside it could no longer recognize the difference, because the new arrangement was the only arrangement they had ever practiced. That ending was diagnostic in spirit but constructive in its implication. If drift can reshape institutions without anyone choosing the reshaping, then the only alternative is to choose. Not to refuse autonomous systems, which is no longer possible, but to renegotiate the terms on which they enter human life.