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+<!--
+SPDX-License-Identifier: CC-BY-SA-4.0
+SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2025-2026 Jonathan D.A. Jewell <j.d.a.jewell@open.ac.uk>
+-->
+
+<div class="lead" wrapper="1">
+
+A turn from writing code to writing the rules, checks, and values that
+code must answer to — and making all three legible enough to be
+contested.
+
+</div>
+
+# The vision
+
+For most of three decades I have worked across cognitive science,
+philosophy, and systems engineering, mostly in private. This manifesto
+marks the move into public: the deployment of the RSR 2026 (Rhodium
+Standard Repository) and the body of work that surrounds it.
+
+The thesis is simple to state and hard to live up to. Most of what
+governs software is left implicit — intent lives in prose, soundness
+lives in trust, value lives in authority. **The metaprogramming turn is
+the decision to make those governing things explicit, first-class, and
+inspectable**: to write not only the program, but the rules it must
+obey, the checks that establish it, and the values it encodes, in a form
+that both a machine and a critic can read and argue with.
+
+I can begin this. I cannot finish it alone — and a manifesto about
+making value contestable would contradict itself if it stayed a
+monologue. So from here it is *we*.
+
+We value, in the precise sense that this whole project is *about* value:
+
+- explicit, contestable structure over implicit good faith;
+
+- checked certainty over fluent plausibility;
+
+- rigour applied wherever a problem demands it over rigour rationed to
+  the problems we have agreed to call "technical".
+
+# Core pillars
+
+Each pillar is a position, not a slogan. Each is meant to be disagreed
+with.
+
+## 1. Machine-readable governance
+
+The rules an estate lives by — licensing, provenance, conventions, who
+may change what — should be encoded as machine-readable artifacts, not
+narrated in prose that quietly drifts from the code it describes. A
+human-centric README cannot be checked; governance-as-data can. The
+`6SCM` pattern is how this estate encodes those rules so that tooling,
+and AI agents, can verify conformance and flag drift rather than take a
+paragraph’s word for it.
+
+*What this rejects:* the prose README as the source of truth about how a
+system is meant to behave.
+
+## 2. Neurosymbolic verification
+
+Probabilistic generation may propose; only symbolic method may dispose.
+Where correctness matters, an unproven output from a language model is a
+hypothesis, not a result, and treating fluency as evidence is a category
+error. The discipline is to pair generation with mechanised checking so
+that the part which can be certain has the last word.
+
+*What this rejects:* plausibility mistaken for proof. (`hypatia` is the
+clearest concrete instance.)
+
+## 3. Post-disciplinary praxis
+
+The rigour we reserve for compilers belongs equally to consent, to
+policy, to accountability. The line between a "technical" problem that
+deserves formal treatment and a "social" one left to good faith is
+itself a choice — and often an alibi. Post-disciplinary means reaching
+for whatever discipline the problem needs; *praxis* means refusing to
+separate the theory from the practice that tests it. The same instinct
+runs from labour-union policy to RISC-V SSGs.
+
+*What this rejects:* the division of labour that keeps rigour out of the
+rooms where power actually operates. (`avow-protocol`, consent-as-code,
+is the most developed example.)
+
+# The wager: value made legible
+
+Underneath all three pillars is one bet. Deciding what a system *should*
+do, whether an output *counts* as correct, who *consented*, and what
+*matters* are all judgments of value — and they are usually smuggled in
+implicitly and backed by authority: *trust me*, *the spec says so*, *the
+model said so*. Axiology is the study of value; the metaprogramming turn
+applies it operationally. Value is not asserted, it is *structured* —
+and structure can be inspected, checked, and argued with.
+
+This is also why the work is, at root, political as well as technical. A
+value that is explicit and inspectable can be contested by the people it
+bears on; a value backed only by authority cannot. Making value legible
+is therefore a precondition for accountability — in a compiler, in an AI
+system, and in a union. It is the point at which formal methods and
+solidarity economics turn out to want the same thing: that the rules be
+legible, and the powerful be answerable to them.
+
+It is the same instinct that runs through the technical research —
+identity defined by equivalence rather than asserted, a value justified
+by the construction that produced it rather than taken on faith. The
+manifesto only generalises that instinct, from values inside a program
+to values inside our systems and institutions.
+
+# Reading order
+
+- `EXPLAINME.adoc` — the canonical "what is this" entry-point, consumed
+  by AI agents and by the `hyperpolymath/standards` governance tooling.
+
+- `docs/` — supporting essays, position papers, and ADRs that situate
+  the manifesto in context.
+
+- `MAINTAINERS.adoc` — current stewards.
+
+# Status
+
+- **Licence:** MPL-2.0 (migrated from PMPL-1.0-or-later on 2026-05-26
+  per the estate licence-debt audit,
+  [hyperpolymath/standards#196](https://github.com/hyperpolymath/standards/pull/196)).
+
+- **Maturity:** a work in progress; the manifesto is a living document.
+  The version number on the title line is incremented on each
+  substantive revision.
+
+- **Audit findings:** see `docs/tech-debt-2026-05-26.md` if present
+  (added by the 2026-05-26 estate tech-debt scan).
+
+# Engaging with this manifesto
+
+Collaboration here is not decoration; by the argument above it is
+constitutive. A manifesto that makes value contestable earns its keep
+only by being contested, adopted, and extended. Three ways in:
+
+- **Disagree** — open an Issue. Manifestos thrive on being argued with,
+  and a pillar that no one challenges has not yet been tested.
+
+- **Adopt a thread** — fork, riff, cite. The MPL-2.0 licence makes
+  derivative manifestos easy.
+
+- **Contribute editorially** — see
+  <a href="CONTRIBUTING.md" class="md">CONTRIBUTING</a> for the
+  (intentionally light) editorial conventions.
+
+Whether you are a researcher, a maintainer, a journalist, or a student,
+the door is open — and the NUJ and solidarity-economics threads here
+mean I take "we" literally.
+
+# Companion repositories
+
+- `hyperpolymath/standards` — the RSR 2026 standards that the first
+  pillar references.
+
+- `hyperpolymath/hypatia` — the neurosymbolic analyser that is the
+  second pillar’s clearest concrete instantiation.
+
+- `hyperpolymath/avow-protocol` — the consent-as-code stack that is the
+  third pillar’s most-developed example.