---
slug: oip-v3-book-ix-the-amendment-protocol
title: Total Structure v3: Law IX — THE AMENDMENT PROTOCOL
canonical: https://miscsubjects.com/a/oip-v3-book-ix-the-amendment-protocol
---

# LAW IX — THE AMENDMENT PROTOCOL

*New in v3.0. A₁₂ requires that the structure revise itself; A₁₂ equally requires that it never revise silently. This book is the governance of the document you are reading — the self-altering mechanism, chained.*

## The Document Is an Object

This document is an object under its own grammar (Law VI): it has a contract (this book), a proof path (its version ledger), tests (Law X's surfaces), and a repair loop (the amendment classes below). Accordingly:

**IX.1 — Append-only versioning.** No version of this document is ever destroyed or edited in place. Every amendment produces a new version with lineage to its predecessor. A silent edit is a forged receipt, and a forged receipt anywhere voids trust everywhere.

**IX.2 — Mandatory changelog.** Every version ships its changelog — every non-trivial editorial decision declared, with rationale. A document about auditable systems that cannot itself be audited is a one-way mirror.

**IX.3 — Typed claims.** Every claim in the document carries one of four types — *axiom*, *derivation*, *observed*, *open* — and every *observed* claim carries a freshness window. This typing is what makes amendment tractable: you cannot correctly revise what you have not correctly typed.

## The Amendment Classes

Every proposed change is one of four classes, each with its own bar:

**Class P — Patch.** Compression, clarity, cross-reference, typo. The semantic diff must be empty: a patch that changes what the document claims is a misfiled revision and is rejected as a patch. Bar: the compression axiom — fewer moves, same load.

**Class R — Revision.** Changes a *derivation* or *observed* claim. Bar: an attack per Law X's protocol that survived — exact claim named, surface named, type classified, full-scope accounting shown, minimum patch proposed. The revision *is* the minimum patch of a surviving attack. No surviving attack, no revision: the document does not change to taste.

**Class E — Extension.** Adds structure — a book, a doctrine, an axiom. Bar, threefold: the addition must ship its own falsification conditions (an unfalsifiable extension is decoration); it must pass the **anti-bloat rule** — added load must exceed added length, accounted in the changelog (this is how "make it longer" and "keep it compressed" reconcile: length is permitted exactly where it carries proportional load); and if the extension is an axiom, it must survive A₀ — published with its negation and the reason the negation collapses.

**Class X — Reversal.** Removes or inverts an axiom. Bar: the full attack protocol at the axiom's dependency depth, plus explicit accounting of everything downstream that falls with it (per Appendix A's map). And one exclusion, absolute: **A₄ is not amendable.** A structure that can amend its own moral floor under pressure has no floor — it has a price. The kill switch is the one place where self-alteration is prohibited *by the self-alteration protocol itself*, and the prohibition is the protocol's proof of seriousness: a document that reserves nothing reveres nothing. If A₄ falls, the document does not get revised. It gets refuted, and its refutation should be published with the same lineage discipline as its versions.

## The Review Recursion

Modeled on the running loop of Law VI, installed here:

**IX.4 — Zero-context review.** On a declared cadence, the document is submitted to zero-context readers — human or model — who score it on two separate axes: clarity (can a cold reader operate the structure from the text alone?) and conformance (does the document obey its own rules — typed claims, fresh windows, declared nodes, compressed prose?). Scores and named gaps are ledgered.

**IX.5 — Failing review queues revision.** A score below the declared threshold queues a Class P or Class R amendment targeting the named deficiency. A gap named by a reviewer — a concept the document needs and lacks — queues a Class E extension, which then enters the same review cycle. The document grows where its readers demonstrate its absence, not where its author enjoys its presence.

**IX.6 — Freshness enforcement.** Every *observed* claim is re-verified within its freshness window. A stale *observed* claim is automatically demoted to *open* — not deleted, demoted — until re-verified. The existence proof of Law VI is the first client of this rule: its claims about the running build expire and must be re-receipted, because a philosophy citing a dead build as live evidence is exactly the declared-success-without-receipts that Law III calls capture.

**IX.7 — The objection ledger is live.** Settled objections (Law IV) are carried in the document with their answers. An entry is settled only while its answer survives; any attacker may reopen an entry by showing the answer stale or the design changed. A ledger that cannot be reopened is dogma in rigor's costume.

## The Capture Guard

The amendment protocol is itself a system, and systems get captured. Three guards:

**IX.8 — Amendment by protocol, not by position.** No steward, including the original author, may amend outside the classes and bars above. The author's advantage is proximity, not privilege: their amendments face the same protocol.

**IX.9 — The fork rule.** If a steward refuses the minimum patch of a surviving attack, the correct move is not surrender and not sabotage — it is **fork with declared lineage**: a new version line, publicly derived, carrying the surviving patch, with the refusal documented in its changelog. The protocol can be routed around, but only in the open. A secret fork is a capture; a declared fork is a check. This rule is Law III's checking network applied to the document itself: no single steward, including the maker, is the load-bearing structure — the lineage discipline is.

**IX.10 — Recursion audit.** The review loop itself is reviewable: its cadence, thresholds, and reviewer selection are declared, ledgered, and amendable under Class R. A self-review loop whose parameters are hidden is a one-way mirror at the meta-level — and surface S8 (Law X) is the standing invitation to attack it.

This book is the difference between a philosophy and a living protocol. v1 declared. v2 organized and armed. v3 breathes on a ledger: strained by cold readers, fractured on schedule, repaired with lineage, forkable in the open, and reserved in exactly one place — the floor.

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## Corpus map
- Canonical shelf: [Total Structure root](/a/oip-total-structure)
