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 asbestos case
Emitters: the producers and processors, then their successors, among them the compensation funds. Over latencies of several decades, the original emitter has often disappeared — bankruptcy, dissolution —: the firm frequently escapes the return, which then strikes its successor, legal, budgetary or territorial. Mediation: organised doubt — captive expertise, committees, regulatory latency maintained. Accumulation is silent, and the medical latency of the fibres works for that doubt. Saturation does not come from a physical limit: the mediation gives way under litigation, press coverage and independent expert assessments. The returns are transmuted: the export was material, the returns are economic (compensation, asbestos removal) and political (trials, regulatory delegitimation). Between the industrialisation of use and prohibition, the paper observes a latency of the order of forty to sixty years. National bans were finally accompanied by a partial re-displacement towards the jurisdictions that still authorise use.
What this case establishes, and what it does not. It verifies that the states and conditions of the loop make it possible to code a documented displacement without ad hoc hypotheses. It does not validate the loop: a closed and famous case is coded after the fact, and the test proper will come from pre-registered cases, in which the receptacle and the latency are named before the return. Nor is it a legal study: the paper proposes no reform of liability law. The full passage is in Section 8 of the full text (PDF, p. 18).
An accessible presentation of the loop is available on the page What is the anthropic loop?; the general concept on the page What is anthropy?; the full framework is developed in the book ANTHROPY – A Big History of Civilization’s Hidden Costs (2026, 632 p.).