The evidence first
Five documented business wrongs, triaged
Each entered the same triage that ranks the civic corpus: a real citation at the door, substance refused on principle, and a score — reach × leverage — that shows its inputs. One of the five lands at the very top of the whole table, beside Horizon — and all five are now walked in full as machine-validated scenarios, every verdict a strain, every limit named on its page.
The count nobody can check shareholder-vote-plumbing · 3 × 3 = 9
Corporate elections pass through chains of custodians no outsider can audit. In the Dole Foods settlement a Delaware court met a third more facially valid claims than there were shares in existence; Procter & Gamble's proxy fight reversed on a recount, inside plumbing nobody could independently re-walk. This is the kernel's home ground — an end-to-end verifiable count in an append-only register turns trust the intermediaries into check the tally. The Horizon lesson, applied to the ballot itself. Now encoded: the full walkthrough — a register forced to add up before ballots open, a flipped instruction caught the hour it lands, a 41,124-vote margin anyone can recompute.
Honest limit: one share, one vote is a weighted franchise. The equal-persons floor does not bind here — and the manifest below has to say so out loud. Verdict: strains — the counting holds; the strain lives in the franchise and the adopters.
Dismissed by a model, reasons withheld gig-deactivation-no-reasons · 3 × 2 = 6
Drivers deactivated by automated decision, no reason served, nothing to appeal — until a court in Amsterdam ordered explanations under data-protection law, years after the accounts went dark. Under the kernel every adverse decision cites the rule it acts under at the moment it acts, so a decision with no reason becomes a visible missing reason, dated and appealable from day one. The corpus already holds this wrong with the state as defendant: the welfare algorithm that could not say why. Now encoded: the full walkthrough — the trigger sealed but committed, the "purely symbolic" human review timed and published, the licensing cascade answered from the record.
Honest limit: it cannot judge whether the rule is fair or the model biased — it makes the missing reason a fact. Verdict: strains — thin review is measured, not cured, and lost days are repaid only where a rule says so.
A ballot inside the boss's power union-ballot-employer-interference · 2 × 2 = 4 ⚠
Mandatory meetings, watched infrastructure — and at Amazon's Bessemer warehouse, a regulator's finding of interference and an ordered rerun that ran under the same fear. Receipt-free ballots are the kernel's oldest discipline: nobody can prove their vote to anyone, so nodding along in the meeting costs nothing at the count. Now encoded: the full walkthrough — the mailbox abolished as a category, a watched cast unmade from a kitchen, a tally both adversaries co-sign.
Honest limit: retaliation operates outside the booth. The organiser dismissed before any ballot opens is a wrong no ballot design reaches — the triage carries the caveat, the scenario honours it. Verdict: strains.
Delisted, citing no rule marketplace-delisting-no-rule · 2 × 2 = 4
Sellers suspended with revenue held and no rule named — a wrong so routine the EU legislated a statement of reasons (Regulation 2019/1150) because platforms would not give one. The kernel's forms discipline is the same demand made structural: every demand cites its rule, rules change on notice with an expiry, and the rule change itself lands in the record. Now encoded: the full walkthrough — retroactive enforcement made arithmetic, the frozen money given an author and a clock, the confession industry starved of its market.
Honest limit: it binds platforms that adopt it, or that law compels. The EU shows the second path exists. Verdict: strains — the platform still writes the rules.
Member democracy in tiers coop-governance-opaque · 2 × 2 = 4
The Co-operative Group — owned by millions — ran its member democracy through tiers no member could follow or check, and was found "manifestly dysfunctional" (Myners, 2014) only at the point of near-collapse. This is the club-AGM machinery at scale: verifiable member votes, and layers whose every decision sits on a register a member can walk. Of the five, this is the one a willing adopter could run this year — a mutual chooses its own constitution. Now encoded: the full walkthrough — the motion that cannot vanish, the carpetbagger raid dated by arithmetic, the board act that cites its power.
Honest limit: legibility is not competence. The losses that nearly sank the Group were substance, and substance stays the members' problem. Verdict: strains — and the real movement, offered repair, chose less democracy instead.
The honest pitch
A manifest, not a makeover
Every adoption of the kernel must publish, in a form anyone's phone can read, exactly which parts it took and which it left out. Point that rule at a firm and it does something no governance code quite manages: it makes the firm's actual constitution legible. A company that adopts the ballot machinery does not become a democracy — it becomes checkable:
The subtraction is not a failure of the pitch; it is the pitch. What a firm claims about its own governance becomes something an employee, a shareholder, or a regulator can check against what it published — and what it will not grant sits on the page instead of in the fine print.
The refusals travel too
What it will not decide, in the office as anywhere
- Whether the dismissal was fair, whether the union should win, what anyone ought to be paid — substance, refused. The kernel makes the decision and its reasons checkable; it never makes the judgment.
- The refusal is not politeness. A machine that judged these would be worth capturing — by the employer first.
Where this starts
Small, willing, and checkable
Not with a listed company. The scores above point the long way — the shareholder count is the biggest wrong and the hardest adopter. The short way is the willing end: a mutual, a co-op, a members' club that chooses its own rules. The machinery for that already runs — the invitation and the run sheet for a shadow AGM, with the official result still decided the old way while the new record proves itself beside it.
And the same standing offer as everywhere on this site: the corpus these five have joined, the triage that scored them, and the game, if you think you can rig it.