Anthropy is the hypothesis that social systems displace disorder rather than resolve it.
This working paper is the theoretical keystone of the series: it formalises the anthropic loop, the complete mechanism that the first six papers had described in segments — the outward leg (AWP-01), the threshold (AWP-02), the lock-in (AWP-06).
The loop in one sentence
The anthropic loop describes the complete cycle of disorder displacement: a social system displaces its disorder toward a receptacle (E1), the load accumulates (E2) until saturation (E3), returns to the emitting system (E4), which re-displaces toward a new receptacle or reconfigures (E5). The loop never returns to its starting point: each iteration consumes displacement capacity — it is a spiral.
Three lineages, one specific difference
The apparatus is situated within an explicit triple lineage. Anthropy (Lalut) extends K. William Kapp’s cost-shifting — which established as early as 1950 that shifting costs onto third parties is systemic — by closing it into a loop: the displaced cost accumulates, saturates its receptacle, and comes back. It retains from Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen the lesson of the closed system — there is no infinite elsewhere — without importing thermodynamics: its receptacles are social, territorial, and attentional. And it is distinguished from Bernard Stiegler’s anthropy by an acknowledged homonymy: for Stiegler, the word names a production of disorder to be fought through neganthropy; for Lalut, a mechanism of circulation. Credit for the “boomerang effect” is returned to Ulrich Beck, and the loop is set apart from its neighbours: Harvey (the spatio-temporal fix), Lessenich, system dynamics.
The apparatus: a conceptual state machine
The formalisation holds in nine definitions, five states, three conditions — two of receptacle saturation, one of transfer arrest —, four forms of return, and six propositions of differentiated status (three empirical, one postulate, two corollaries), recapitulated in a synoptic table. The most novel contribution is twofold: condition C3, which treats the invisibility of a transfer as a maintenance cost — observable before any return —, and the transmutation of the return: disorder rarely comes back in the form in which it was exported, which explains why returns are so rarely imputed to their originating displacement.
Falsifiability: the stopping rule
Formalisation is only worth its cost if it increases refutability. The paper fixes an ex ante protocol — naming the receptacle and the order of magnitude of the expected latency before the analysis — which disciplines both directions: the assertion of a displacement and the certification of an internalisation. One case external to the corpus, asbestos, is coded end to end as a test of the apparatus.
The general concept is presented on the page What is anthropy?; the full framework is developed in the book ANTHROPIE — Ordre ici. Dette ailleurs (in French).