Horizontal: where power sits. Vertical: what that power answers to. Pace is carried as a marker, not a coordinate — a ring means the principal is currently arguing for restraint. A principal that has moved since the chosen reference shows its earlier position as a dotted outline with an arrow to where it stands now; one that has not moved is drawn plainly.
Drift is measured from the last quarterly snapshot by default, so an arrow on the default view is movement this instrument has itself recorded under the scoring rule; the 2025 and 2023 references show the longer arc. Beijing sits high on answerability because a forum and a standing order genuinely exist. It is not one that anybody outside the Party can enter, which is the distinction this axis cannot carry on its own and the non-domination test has to supply.
Principals ranked against one another. The default order is purposive standing — how close each sits to the empty quadrant, which is the p/acc reading of acceleration: distributed and answerable at once. Re-rank by a single axis, or by stated pace, to see how differently the board reads when the visible layer is taken at face value. The move column is places gained or lost since the principal was first plotted.
| # | Move | Principal | Standing | Topology | Answerability | Pace | Anchoring act |
|---|
Standing is 100 minus the distance to the p/acc target as a share of the furthest possible distance on the board; it rewards movement toward constituted, distributed power and nothing else. Stated pace ranks acceleration first, as the plain reading of the phrase would, and carries no historical rank because pace is a marker rather than a coordinate.
Only entries that change a coordinate belong here. The column that matters is which axis moved.
Nine things that would move a principal vertically. Until one of them happens, restraint on this board remains revocable by the party that granted it.
Topology records where power sits, from concentration in a few labs and states to distribution across open weights and many operators. It is necessary to argue about and insufficient to settle anything: a distributed system with no reference value has spread the discretion around rather than removed it.
Answerability records what power answers to, from discretionary self-restraint to constituted restraint with a forum and recourse. A governor has a reference value set from outside; a dial has only a setting, and the hand on it belongs to the party being restrained. The test is procedural — who can revoke it, and what recourse a person outside the firm has.
Pace is the stated setting. It moves weekly, commits nobody, and is carried here as a marker so that movement on it can be told apart from movement on the two axes that decide outcomes.
A coordinate moves on a dated act with a source: a published commitment, an instrument used, a standard written or adopted, an institution founded. Interviews, essays and endorsements move the pace marker only. Vertical movement requires that somebody other than the restrained party gains a power they did not previously have.
Weekly scan for moves; quarterly snapshot of all coordinates so that drift is visible against a fixed baseline. The instrument's headline number is the ratio of pace movement to answerability movement, because the whole claim of the p/acc reading is that the first is large and the second is close to zero.
The vertical axis conflates a forum that anyone may enter with one that a single polity controls, which is why Beijing and a constituted commons can score similarly and mean opposite things. A domination score is the obvious third dimension and is not yet built. Second, the scoring rule rewards visible institutional acts and will therefore under-read restraint that is genuinely written into infrastructure and never announced.