Burden & load

How a system allocates the cost of operation or failure—time, attention, stress, and emotional labor.

The slope of effort and risk across roles or communities. A steep burden gradient means those with the least power carry the heaviest operational load while decision-makers feel little friction.

Mapping the gradient exposes where to redistribute work through fair burden distribution and reduce moral overhead.

The amount of harm generated when the system fails. Ethotechnics seeks low-failure-load architectures supported by graceful degradation.

Moments when system failure pushes labor onto humans, often triggering moral overhead.

The baseline flow of upkeep—patching, cleaning, rehearsing, and caring—that keeps a service alive when nothing is on fire. Healthy maintenance metabolism is budgeted, scheduled, and shared rather than squeezed between crises.

Falling below it signals rising maintenance debt and invites maintenance windows before fragility compounds.

Accumulated obligations from skipping basic upkeep. The interest is paid in slower recovery, brittle systems, and people burning out to keep things running.

Paying it down requires restoring the maintenance metabolism, scheduling maintenance windows, and tracking work in the repair log.

Extra work users or operators must do to behave ethically within a bad system.

When one group continually absorbs the toil of keeping a system alive so another group can move fast or claim success. It often hides behind gratitude for “resilience” while masking extraction.

Ethotechnic practice flattens this by lowering the burden gradient and designing for stopability so resilience is institutional, not personal.