Value is produced through distributed decisions made by markets, regulations, institutions, experts and systems of comparison, and it is rarely traceable to one author — AuthorityFragment names the condition under which power remains fully active even as responsibility for the whole consequence disappears into its parts. Some of these distributed arrangements become nearly impossible to alter: SystemicLock describes value-producing structures that persist because too many institutions now depend on their continuation, whatever their deficiencies. What legitimises the whole arrangement, in the end, is CitationalCommitment — the visible intellectual and political sources through which a claim of value earns the right to be believed.
