A community cannot all fit in one room, so it relies on newspapers, broadcast, and now digital feeds to carry recognition across the distances face-to-face contact cannot reach. That works when the media layer is built to pass along what people are actually like, but feeds tuned to capture attention pull the other way, rewarding outrage and novelty over accuracy, so what travels fastest is often what distorts most. The pillar's claim is that a healthy public square is shared infrastructure, like courts or public health: local reporting, independent public broadcasting, and rules that require platforms to serve people rather than mine their attention. It is not a frill that the rest of civic life can do without. It also argues that accuracy is best protected not by appointing an official arbiter of truth, which invites capture, but by many independent outlets investigating the same thing and converging, with disagreement itself left visible. The test throughout is whether the information environment keeps a population's picture of itself tied to what it actually is, rather than to whatever a feed found most clickable.

Belonging ([§9.2](<9.2 Belonging.md>)) established the face-to-face base of mutual recognition at the political-community scale. What happens when that base scales into the mediated information environment matters here: newspapers, broadcast, and the digital infrastructure that handles most population-scale public discourse in current conditions. The two layers are jointly constitutive: mediated discourse can carry recognition once a face-to-face base exists, but it cannot create one where the base has been lost; the section's predictions track what happens when the mediation layer is offered as a substitute for the base rather than as the scaling of it.

The information environment derives from [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) (Morality), with [§8.10](<8.10 Language.md>) (Language), [§8.11](<8.11 Technology.md>) (Technology), and [§8.13](<8.13 Art.md>) (Art) supplying the mediation mechanism. Language is identified ([§8.10](<8.10 Language.md>)) as the technology by which modal representations are transferred between bodies; technology ([§8.11](<8.11 Technology.md>)) as the externalization of modal representations into shared media; art ([§8.13](<8.13 Art.md>)) as the transmission of *how* a structure shows up to a mind, the non-propositional channel that rides the same infrastructure language does. At population scale, those technologies become the information environment: the standing infrastructure through which recognition can travel beyond face-to-face encounter. At stake is what that infrastructure must preserve if the mutual recognition built in local community life is to scale without being consumed.

Where the face-to-face base is intact, the information environment can carry recognition across the distances the base cannot reach on its own. Where the base has been lost, communities try to recognize one another through algorithmically curated feeds, and what comes back is a representation of the neighbor, not the neighbor.

Several structural deposits follow.

*Digital mediation systematically degrades distinctness and asymmetric exchange.* Recognition is grounded ([§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>)) in subjects who occupy *distinct* positions and can be reached *across asymmetric exchange*: the encounter with a subject whose perspective the recognizing subject cannot directly access and must infer across the interface between them. Two conditions are jointly required: that the other appears as genuinely *other*, bringing a position the recognizing subject does not already hold; and that the exchange is *asymmetric*, meaning something is at stake across it that the encounter has not pre-selected. The profile compresses distinctness into curated presentation; the algorithmic feed compresses asymmetry into confirmation, selecting for the recognizing subject's existing priors rather than for what the neighbor's actual conditions require. Bakshy, Messing, and Adamic (2015) measured the relative contributions of algorithmic ranking and individual self-selection to the compression on Facebook, finding both contributing and self-selection contributing more than the ranking layer: the degradation is therefore not a feature only of platform design but a joint effect of design and user behavior under the design's incentive structure. The face-to-face base [§9.2](<9.2 Belonging.md>) develops preserves both conditions; the mediation layer's structural task is to carry them, not consume them.

*Engagement-extraction and mutual-recognition optimize against each other.* Engagement-optimization rewards salience, urgency, and outrage: inputs that degrade mutual-recognition accuracy by amplifying the loudest emotional reactions, which [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) identifies as the least reliable guide to what is actually the case. The empirical record runs the prediction, and the studies that bear it out (the diffusion-asymmetry and platform-deactivation findings) are taken up at [§9.4.4](<9.4.4 What is Confirmed.md>); neither requires the engagement-optimization industry to intend the degradation for the degradation to follow from the optimization. Mutual recognition rewards intelligibility, repair, and continuity: slower architectures than engagement-optimized systems can afford. The two optimizations are not contingently in tension; they are pointed in opposite directions on the same axis. A platform whose revenue depends on attention-capture is therefore not merely failing to serve mutual recognition; it is consuming what mutual recognition requires to function. That the two optimizations are pointed apart does not by itself settle which prevails; the cost structure does. A resource-intensive degradation would meet its own price as a brake, but engagement-degradation is cheap to produce and cheaper to distribute, so nothing on the cost side disciplines it and the extraction settles into a stable equilibrium rather than a self-correcting lapse. This is why the function cannot be left to the market that degrades it: where the degrading operation is the low-cost one, price pressure selects for it, and only provision structured outside the engagement-extraction incentive can carry the recognition function, the public-square infrastructure this section derives below. The pattern is the [§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>) (Economy) extraction logic specialized to the information-environment case. Noble's *Algorithms of Oppression* (2018) documents how engagement-optimization produces structurally racialized outputs at scale: algorithmic feed curation systematically over-surfacing stereotyped representations of Black communities and women, producing the engagement-extraction failure asymmetrically across the populations it operates on. The race-stratified failure mode is empirically asymmetric, not uniform: news-desert geography concentrates in low-income and Black-majority US counties, digital-divide access asymmetries persist along income and race lines, and the triangulation-across-plural-independent-investigation the section's third deposit requires presupposes outlet plurality that has degraded faster in some communities than others. Tufekci's *Twitter and Tear Gas* (2017) documents the parallel dynamic at the social-movement-amplification register; Zuboff's *The Age of Surveillance Capitalism* (2019) names engagement-extraction as a structural business model rather than only an architectural pattern; Benkler, Faris, and Roberts's *Network Propaganda* (2018) documents the asymmetric-polarization signature across political coalitions.

*Public-square infrastructure is collective investment in the same register as the legal system or the public-health system.* Local media, public-broadcasting infrastructure with structural independence, and the regulatory environment that holds platform architecture to recognition rather than extraction: these constitute the mediation-layer counterpart to the civic-infrastructure base of [§9.2](<9.2 Belonging.md>). They are not an optional subsidy that the rest of civic life can compensate for. Where they are dismantled, the digital information environment loses what it has to answer to; where they are sustained, the digital information environment can be held to its actual job. Public-square infrastructure must also be accessible across the capability range of the population it serves (ASL interpretation in broadcasting, screen-reader-compatible web infrastructure, low-literacy news products, multi-language coverage in linguistically plural communities), without which the infrastructure is structurally available to some participants and absent for others (the capabilities-approach extension developed at [§9.2](<9.2 Belonging.md>) and [§9.8](<9.8 Housing.md>)). The framework derives the constitutive role; specific funding architectures, ownership rules, and platform regulations remain underdetermined where multiple designs satisfy the constraint.

*Information rights bind against intermediate authorities.* The *binds against intermediate authorities* result of [§9.1](<9.1 Rights.md>) holds at the information register. Parents, religious institutions, schools, and other intermediate authorities exercise legitimate authority over the formation of the children in their care, but that authority does not extend to foreclosing the children's future capacity to participate in the political community on their own recognition. Feinberg's "Child's Right to an Open Future" (1980) named the structural commitment most cleanly: children possess rights-in-trust that the adults they will become can exercise, and the right to information, to the conditions under which [§8.3](<8.3 Knowledge.md>) (Knowledge) and [§8.4.4](<8.4.4 What is Confirmed.md>) (capacity-for-analysis) develop, is among them. The result precludes the following patterns: information-withholding that closes off the child's capacity to evaluate the upbringing's commitments as an adult (Wisconsin v. Yoder 1972 as the wrong-way precedent the framework departs from); active-misinformation regimes that install false models the child must later spend recognition resources unwinding; and capacity-targeted restriction that conflates the legitimate age-graded calibration of which information a particular child can use with the inverted use of that calibration to restrict information *because the controlling authority disapproves of it*. The default runs the other direction: information is available, graded by demonstrated capacity to use it (the Gillick-competence standard from *Gillick v. West Norfolk* 1985 generalizes the principle), and restriction is the structural exception that requires justification at the capacity-and-harm register rather than at the doctrine-of-the-controlling-adult register. UN Convention on the Rights of the Child Articles 13 and 17 codify the commitment internationally; Callan's *Creating Citizens* (1997), Gutmann's *Democratic Education* (1987), and Macedo's *Diversity and Distrust* (2000) develop the philosophical apparatus. The framework derives the same commitment from the binds-against-intermediate-authorities result of [§9.1](<9.1 Rights.md>) and the [§8.3](<8.3 Knowledge.md>) / [§8.4.4](<8.4.4 What is Confirmed.md>) capacities the participation conditions presuppose. The result applies symmetrically at the workplace-information register: NDA-enforced silence on conditions of employment, social-media policies binding off-hours speech, and surveillance of personal communications are intermediate-authority information-controls of the same structural form, developed at [§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>) and [§9.12](<9.12 Enforcement.md>) for the Private Government register specifically (Anderson, *Private Government* 2017).

*Accuracy is enforced through structural plurality, not content adjudication.* The right to life of [§9.1](<9.1 Rights.md>), articulated at the information register, entails a right to accurate information: the conditions under which [§8.3](<8.3 Knowledge.md>) (Knowledge) can hold what the world is actually doing rather than what an interested party has paid to have it appear to do. The standard liberal-democratic worry is that government truth-determination is the road to authoritarian capture; the framework grants the worry and locates the answer where the worry does not apply. Triangulation across plural independent investigation is the structural mechanism. When multiple outlets investigate the same conditions independently and converge on a finding, the convergence is the recognition; when one diverges from convergence in a documented direction, the divergence is itself legible as such. No single authority adjudicates truth; the structural plurality does. This is Rawlsian public-reason architecture applied at the information register (Rawls, *Political Liberalism* 1993): convergent investigation across plural outlets is the institutional substitute for any single comprehensive doctrine adjudicating accuracy. O'Neill's *A Question of Trust* (2002 BBC Reith Lectures) develops press-trustworthiness as institutional rather than individual property, the same structural-conditions reading from a different starting point. The plurality the derivation requires is also position-plural (investigative capacity across the range of political positions the population actually holds), not position-converged plurality whose outlet-count is high but whose substantive coverage has collapsed onto a single editorial direction; the agonistic property is constitutive of the triangulation, not optional to it. The conditions under which triangulation works are therefore what [§9.4](<9.4 Information.md>) commits to: independent investigative capacity at the outlet level, ownership diversity that prevents structural consolidation around a single narrative, source-transparency requirements that let readers see who funded what, public-broadcasting infrastructure operating outside engagement-extraction (the BBC, NHK, ZDF, NPR/PBS, and CBC traditions), and algorithmic-amplification accountability that prevents curated subsets from collapsing the cross-outlet visibility triangulation requires. These levers are structural conditions, not content rules; none requires government adjudication of which story is accurate. The framework converges with Habermas's structural account of the public sphere (*Faktizität und Geltung* 1992), Benkler's networked-information-production analysis (*The Wealth of Networks* 2006), and the Hutchins Commission's *A Free and Responsible Press* (1947) on the structural-conditions reading; the distinctive contribution is deriving public-broadcasting infrastructure as a structural requirement rather than a contested side-question, because the second deposit's engagement-extraction-versus-recognition asymmetry rules out advertising-funded press as the sole carrier of the function [§9.4](<9.4 Information.md>) requires. *Kinds of falsehood require different structural levers.* Factual error is addressed through correction process; bias and framing are addressed through plurality; deliberate fabrication is addressed through defamation law where there is a victim and through reputational consequence where there is not (the *Sullivan*-standard protects honest mistakes, not knowing falsity); coordinated state disinformation is addressed through disclosure-of-state-affiliation requirements; engagement-driven amplification is addressed through the algorithmic accountability the second deposit named. The framework precludes conflating them, which is how both authoritarian overreach and liberty-absolutist underreach get produced.

*The right to accurate information has a positive face: what power conceals, it owes.* The accuracy condition protects the picture from being corrupted; the positive condition requires that certain conditions be affirmatively visible in the first place, and the visibility a party owes scales with the power it holds over others and the public it draws on. The apparatus a population depends on and must direct owes transparency as a condition of that direction: the workings of government are what [§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>) (Representation) needs visible for recognized direction to be possible at all, and the flows of the economy are what [§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>) (Economy) needs visible for extraction to be detectable rather than concealed in the opacity it feeds on. Knowledge produced on the public's funding is owed back to the commons that paid for it; an intermediary that encloses publicly funded science behind a paywall it did not create runs the [§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>) extraction signature at the knowledge register, charging rent on a commons it did not build while starving the [§8.3](<8.3 Knowledge.md>) (Knowledge) conditions the participation rights presuppose. Entities owe visibility into their flows, structure, and beneficial ownership as the price of the public-granted form they act through; the obligation is functional, attaching to economic power exercised in the shared market rather than to the legal wrapper that carries it, since keying it to form alone would license the obvious circumvention of operating in whatever wrapper stays dark. The asymmetry runs one direction only: power owes sight, while subjects keep privacy over their own self-regarding sphere, which is why the personal data an entity holds about the people it touches stays protected even as the entity's own operations are exposed. Opacity is the medium every circumvention runs through, so transparency is not a further good standing beside the others but the structural precondition of the extraction-detection [§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>) requires and the recognized direction [§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>) requires.

*The claim to information is reflexively scoped, exactly as the claim against being wronged is.* The right is a subject's claim to a true picture of the field it navigates for its own life, not a general entitlement to any information whatever regardless of the use to which it is put. It lapses where information is sought as an instrument to dissolve another subject's possibilities: this is the field-attack limit [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) (Morality) develops, where the murderer at the door has no claim to the truth he would use to seize a latitude that is not his. The same asymmetry that obligates power to visibility protects the subject from exposure aimed at taking what is theirs, so that transparency and privacy are not opposed values to be traded against each other but the two faces of one rule about where power and subjecthood respectively lie.

*The cultural-production channel runs both directions.* Art functions as one of the channels the information environment runs on, not decoration sitting beside it. A made vehicle coordinates private simulations across many bodies onto a shared modal target ([§8.13](<8.13 Art.md>)), so that art holds a shared *reading* for a population the way language holds a shared *claim*: Modal Convergence (Theorem 9, [§8.3](<8.3 Knowledge.md>)) operating at the aesthetic register. Public memory, monument, national narrative, and the films, songs, and images a population encounters in common carry recognition at population scale, doing for the felt shape of shared conditions what reporting does for the facts of them. The same mechanism is what makes art the most powerful manipulation vector the environment carries: a channel that installs a shared reading across many bodies at once is, run at coercive scale and against recognition, propaganda: the aesthetic specialization of the manipulative-content failure mode the evidential-channel conditions are written against (§9 root). The two-sidedness is not incidental. Art carries recognition and consumes it through the very same capacity, which is why the public-square infrastructure the section derives has to answer for the cultural-production channel on both counts: protecting the conditions under which it carries shared readings, and refusing the conditions under which it is optimized to install them against a population’s own recognition.

The structural deposits describe public-square infrastructure from the side of what is lost when it fails. The positive account runs in the other direction. When the mediation layer is held to its recognition function and the [§9.2](<9.2 Belonging.md>) base remains intact, a population can keep its model of itself tethered to what it actually is. A population that understands itself only through algorithmically amplified representations brings those representations to [§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>) (Representation). The policies it then supports will answer to the world those representations depict, not to the conditions people are actually living in. The mediation layer is the condition under which the [§9.2](<9.2 Belonging.md>) base scales to the population political life actually consists of — not merely one component of the political community alongside others.

Habermas's account of the public sphere ([1962] 1989) as the base of modern legitimacy is the closest ancestor at the mediation register. The framework converges on the public sphere's structural role and parts on grounding: Habermas locates the binding force in the rational-discursive ideal the public sphere approximates; the framework locates it in the [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) mutual-recognition mechanism the [§9.2](<9.2 Belonging.md>) base supplies and the mediation layer either preserves or consumes. The Inversion is the same one [§9.2](<9.2 Belonging.md>) runs on community: the binding force the tradition located in an idealized rational discourse is what mutual recognition is doing through the mediation layer when the layer is built to carry it.

Two contemporary positions deny the mediation-degradation reading at its premise. Cyber-utopian and networked-community defenses (Benkler, *The Wealth of Networks* 2006; Shirky, *Here Comes Everybody* 2008) rightly note that mediated platforms can produce real recognition; the framework grants this and narrows the claim. The mediation layer carries recognition under specific architectural conditions (when distinctness and asymmetry are preserved, when engagement-optimization is not pointed against recognition, when public-square infrastructure underwrites the layer) and consumes recognition when those conditions are not met. The question is not whether digital infrastructure can do recognition work at all but what architecture allows it to.

What the derivation does not pick. It does not specify platform regulations, content-moderation rules, media-ownership thresholds, or specific public-broadcasting designs. It derives the constraint (that public-square infrastructure must preserve distinctness and asymmetric exchange and must not be optimized against mutual recognition) and leaves implementation underdetermined where multiple architectures satisfy the constraint. Where an architecture systematically degrades mutual recognition while extracting dividends from the community commons it depends on, the framework precludes it on the same logic [§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>) establishes for economic extraction. Where multiple framework-compatible architectures remain, the choice falls to [§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>) (Representation) and to the design literatures the implementation question belongs to.


- [9.4.1 What is Disputed](<9.4.1 What is Disputed.md>)
- [9.4.2 What is Required](<9.4.2 What is Required.md>)
- [9.4.3 What is Predicted](<9.4.3 What is Predicted.md>)
- [9.4.4 What is Confirmed](<9.4.4 What is Confirmed.md>)
- [9.4.5 What is Concluded](<9.4.5 What is Concluded.md>)


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← [9.3.5 What is Concluded](<9.3.5 What is Concluded.md>) | [9.4.1 What is Disputed](<9.4.1 What is Disputed.md>) →
