Primitive Asymmetries of Persistence

A minimal structural lattice of three primitives explaining systematic miscalibration and risk accumulation in persistent digital environments. This working draft introduces a reductionist explanatory framework for why rational, informed agents exhibit compulsive, escalatory participation in digital social systems despite negative expected value. The model rejects psychological, intentional, or adversarial explanations (no irrationality, addiction, deception, pathology, or moral failure required) and locates the failure in architectural mismatch between human present-oriented, context-sensitive cognition and infrastructure enforcing temporal agnosticism, perfect persistence, and context-stripped invariance. Core primitives:1. Temporal Asymmetry — decoupling of immediate decision-time reinforcement from delayed, conditional consequence realization.2. Persistence Without Perceptual Decay — high-fidelity, identity-bound record preservation without contextual erosion or somatic danger encoding.3. Micro-Contextual Coherence Overriding Global Invariance — local-frame optimization overridden by global recontextualization under shifted norms/audiences/power. These interact geometrically to produce inverted reinforcement gradients, heuristic drift, latent exposure accumulation, and delayed activation panic — jointly sufficient for the observed spectrum without additional assumptions. Scope: Foundational structural model only — no empirical validation, diagnostics, or interventions. Implications for AI alignment under persistent memory, governance design, human–infrastructure interfaces, multi-agent incentive geometry, and uncertainty in delayed-feedback regimes.