For the information environment to carry mutual recognition at the scale of a political community (the mediation layer through which the [§9.2](<9.2 Belonging.md>) face-to-face base scales to population size), a structural-necessity inventory specific to the mediation layer can be derived. Drop any one and the rest do not suffice; what the information environment has to deliver to scale the base rather than consume it is the conditions taken together.

*Mediated channel.* The face-to-face base scales into a wider system of newspapers, broadcast, and digital infrastructure that carries recognition beyond what direct encounter can reach. The mediated channel is required alongside the base, not in lieu of it; the two registers are jointly constitutive. A community-architecture that runs only on the face-to-face base fails to scale; one that runs only on the mediated channel loses the ground-truth the base supplies.

*Public anchoring.* Both channels require public-square infrastructure that operates outside engagement-optimization and outside concentrated private control: public broadcasting with structural independence from advertising and direct political pressure, public libraries with their full digital-and-physical role, comprehensive public education, and civic-information infrastructure. These are collective investment in the same register as the legal system or the public-health system, not a discretionary subsidy. (The face-to-face third places, community centers, and neighborhood-scale institutions that anchor the base are developed at [§9.2](<9.2 Belonging.md>).)

*Engagement-optimization preclusion at primary scale.* Platforms occupying the role of primary information-environment infrastructure cannot run on revenue models that optimize for attention-capture, because engagement-optimization and mutual-recognition optimize against each other on the same axis. Engagement-optimization rewards salience, urgency, and outrage: inputs [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) identifies as the least reliable guide to what is actually the case. Small-scale engagement-optimized platforms can exist within an information environment whose primary infrastructure is non-engagement-optimized; the structural failure emerges where engagement-optimization occupies the primary role (Vosoughi, Roy, and Aral 2018; Brady et al. 2017).

*Ownership-concentration limits.* The distribution of recognized narratives across an information environment reflects the ownership structure of that environment. Where ownership concentrates beyond thresholds at which narrative-diversity contracts and narrative-distortion in the direction of owner-aligned preferences expands, the constraint is violated. Specific concentration thresholds belong to the implementation literature; the structural condition is that some such thresholds be maintained (Bagdikian 2004; Herman and Chomsky 1988).

*State-censorship preclusion distinguished from platform-moderation license.* The recognition-quality requirement that grounds the [§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>) direction-recognition protects against state censorship of speech. The same requirement licenses platform-moderation as legitimate stewardship of the platform’s contribution to the information environment. The two are different categories on the framework’s terms; conflating them produces simultaneous failure to protect discourse from state censorship and failure to protect discourse from engagement-optimization-driven degradation.

Together, these conditions are what the information environment must deliver to carry mutual recognition at population scale, jointly with the [§9.2](<9.2 Belonging.md>) base it scales: no one of them omittable without the rest failing to carry the base. [§9.4.3](<9.4.3 What is Predicted.md>) is where those conditions become testable predictions.


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← [9.4.1 What is Disputed](<9.4.1 What is Disputed.md>) | [9.4.3 What is Predicted](<9.4.3 What is Predicted.md>) →
