Glossary entry in Failure modes. Definitions, checks, and evidence for Extractive Cannibalism.
Quick takeaways
Extractive cannibalism is a failure mode where an institution preserves apparent operational stability and output velocity by depleting the unrecorded human…
Extractive cannibalism is a failure mode where an institution preserves apparent operational stability and output velocity by depleting the unrecorded human capacities—such as health, attention, relationships, and moral integrity—on which that stability fundamentally depends.
Like a locomotive burning its own floorboards to keep running at speed, the institution appears solvent on internal dashboards while consuming the structural foundation required for its own long-term survival.
StructuralBurden
Scope
B. Failure modes (why Ethotechnics exists). Recurring ways responsibility dissolves, authority drifts from its evidence, and harm lands on people with no route to challenge it.
Genealogy
Formulated in the critique of closed-circuit solvency and complexity displacement, describing how unmeasured externalities destroy organizational capacity.
A hospital automated scheduling system claims high bed turnover while nursing staff work unrecorded lunch breaks and take leaves of absence from exhaustion.
v1.14.0 · 2026-09-26 — Added three terms: Principle of Non-Expropriation of Resilience, Compensated Performance, and Intrinsic Performance. They separate how well a system works on its own from how much of its success depends on people quietly absorbing its errors, and limit how much of that absorption an institution may demand.
v1.13.0 · 2026-09-22 — Rewrote category descriptions and scope notes to the current framing, replaced vague or promotional definitions in 89 entries and 109 short definitions, removed unsourced adoption and effect claims, and cut filler words and redundant sentences from 38 entries and 20 short definitions. No term was added, removed, or renamed.
v1.12.0 · 2026-09-22 — Added Typed Decision Model and Confidence-Gated Execution, cross-linked to the worked example of a decision-model gate on refunds.
v1.11.0 · 2026-09-22 — Added Decision Threshold, Shaping Hop, and Reason Substitution: the places typed decision models locate authority, shape decisions without making them, and separate the reason from the decision.
v1.10.0 · 2026-09-19 — Promoted 64 orphaned short definitions to full canonical entries across core concepts, governance, decision states, and anti-patterns, and removed three redundant short definitions (procedural-realism, intake-cinema, legibility-illegibility).
v1.9.0 · 2026-09-19 — Added Feedback Proximity, Asymmetric-Capacity Restraint, Adaptive Capacity, Compensatory Adaptation, and Corrective Power, aligned the short definition of Ethotechnics with its canonical authority-and-correction framing, and refreshed the glossary's category scaffolding off the earlier moral-system vocabulary.
v1.8.0 · 2026-09-19 — Added Insulation, the unifying failure mode of the framework: whatever stops the consequences of institutional decisions from traveling back to those who can revise the generating rules, with its channels, its good and bad forms, and its self-ratifying loop.
v1.7.0 · 2026-09-18 — Added Non-Finality, Consequential Contradiction, and The Excluded Case, and generalized the falsified denominator into the falsified ledger — completing the five concerns and the fallibilist ground they stand on.
v1.6.0 · 2026-09-18 — Added Human Non-Substitutability, Safe Incompleteness, Anti-Conversion Rights, Abstention, Constitutional Debt, Discretion Migration, and Corrigibility Rent — the person-side principles, the three abstentions, and the rent concept.
v1.5.0 · 2026-09-18 — Added Exception Absorption, Exception Learning, Case Corrigibility, Structural Corrigibility, Institutional Learning, Corrective Debt, and the Workaround Presumption, formalizing the historical turn: reading institutions through their failure trajectories rather than their stated controls.
v1.4.0 · 2026-09-18 — Added Residual Complexity, Complexity Displacement, Falsified Denominator, Closure Without Remainder, Constitutional Governance, and Post-Optimization Rigor, embedding the foundational contention of burden redistribution.
v1.3.0 · 2026-09-11 — Added Attestation, Liability Record, Carve-Out, Delegation Chain, Composed Latency, and Silent-Harm Discovery, each bound to the standard clause that requires it.
v1.2.0 · 2026-09-08 — Added The Non-Conversion Principle, Exit Cost, and Jurisdictional Path Dependence, each linked to the theory essay that argues for it.