Concept
The return path
What separates Second-Order Design's poles, and the reason the figure has an intervention point at all. A rule-set always produces behavior its author never specified; that is the definition, not the failure. The Fraying is when what it produced reaches whoever could change the rule less and less, until it no longer does. Emergence you like can be Fraying; emergence you hate can be Tending. You never push on the emergence — you push below it, on Information flow., and its one-tier-up form in Proxy Detachment, where the measure *is* the channel and gaming it severs the channel while leaving it apparently intact.
Where it appears
Treated in
- Part Five — The Standing ThirdsThe Skein-KinEleven group patterns, each built from two Dyad-Kin that share a person — the mechanism by which a group becomes a thing rather than a list.
- Part Five — The Standing ThirdsThe Culture-KinSeven patterns slow enough that no single life sees one full turn — and, by the catalogue's own admission, its most provisional tier.