THEORY OF CAPTURE
A Systems Model of Democratic Degradation
Read as: Demand → Activation → Conversion → Outputs → Feedback Loops
INPUTS: Enabling Conditions
POLARIZATION
- Affective sorting / tribal ID
- Media fragmentation
- Zero-sum framing
CRISIS (real or manufactured)
- Economic precarity
- Security threat narrative
- Cultural displacement anxiety
INSTITUTIONAL EROSION
- Declining institutional trust
- Norm degradation / elite defection
- Prior capture-cycle residue
Some inputs are downstream products of earlier capture cycles (see Feedback Loops).
INSTRUMENTS OF CAPTURE
Mutual Reinforcement: Each instrument enables and amplifies the others
LAW
- Selective enforcement / non-enforcement
- Remedies + review disablement
- Removal/appointments
- Immunity & clemency
PERSONNEL
- Loyalty tests / purges
- Schedule F conversion
- Acting appointments
FUNDS
- Impoundment
- Conditional spending
- Contract steering
- Grant defunding
INFORMATION
- Collection halt / sabotage
- Access denial / classification
- Surveillance
NARRATIVE
- State propaganda
- Media intimidation
- Platform capture
VIOLENCE
- State: Militarization, Detention
- Stochastic: Intimidation, Vigilantism
OUTPUTS: Capture Products
MINORITY RULE
- Electoral lock-in (suppression, gerrymandering)
- Counter-majoritarian capture (courts, Senate)
- Policy decoupling from majority will
- Structural lock-in / hard-to-reverse rules
OLIGARCHIC EXTRACTION
- Regulatory capture
- Tax arbitrage / public asset transfer
- Rent extraction (health, housing, edu, energy)
- Wealth concentration acceleration
Minority rule provides political protection for extraction; extraction funds political protection.
FEEDBACK LOOPS (arcs flow right-to-left from Outputs back to earlier stages)
LOOP 1: IMPUNITY
Outputs → Instruments
No prosecution / clemency → Emboldens actors
"Transgression becomes precedent; precedent becomes entitlement."
LOOP 2: EXIT
Outputs → Permission Structure
Brain drain / capital flight → Weakened opposition
"Those who could resist leave; those who remain accommodate."
LOOP 3: EPISTEMIC COLLAPSE
Outputs → Inputs
Information destruction + narrative dominance → Cannot measure harm → Cannot mobilize
"You cannot fight what you cannot name or count. Hardest-to-reverse loop."
Figure: Theory of Capture — Systems Diagram. A model of democratic system conversion into instruments of minority rule and oligarchic extraction. Read left-to-right as causal chain (Demand → Activation → Conversion → Outputs), then trace feedback loops showing system stabilization.
Canonical: /diagrams/theory-of-capture/
1. On coordination: This model does not require conspiracy; systemic outcomes emerge from partial coordination plus convergent incentives.
2. On reversibility: Each feedback loop raises reversal costs and lowers detection probability. Epistemic collapse is the hardest-to-reverse loop: destroyed measurement infrastructure makes harm undocumentable.
3. On endogeneity: The system is self-amplifying. Today's outputs become tomorrow's inputs.