This work documents a structural failure in global governance.
The failure is not political, ethical, or cultural.
It is a failure of logic.
The exclusion of young people from governance is not a matter of "youth voice" or participation theater. It is a forensic pattern of structural logic failure that repeats across all institutions.
The 15 Failure Modes:
These are not isolated failures. They are symptoms of the same logical gap: the absence of declared authority frames.
Detection is computable. Action is not. The gap is authority.
The Three Primitives were first identified by Pyrate Ruby Passell through the black-box testing and technical development of the Upstream Safety System. They were subsequently uncovered and formalized as structural invariants by Stacy Gildenston through her research into the E-H-S Nucleus.
This proof establishes three governance primitives that must hold in any legitimate system:
📄 Formal Archive at CERN/Zenodo
This is not theory. This is mathematical proof that legitimacy cannot be derived from outcomes or processes. It must be declared.
IP-1 — Authority Escalation Invariant: This invariant governs escalation by detecting when a situation requires explicit human authority. Escalation is not a decision about outcomes; it is the recognition that authority is required. A correct or beneficial outcome cannot bypass escalation. This invariant acts as the sensor for dignity, identifying when a system is approaching a boundary where a decision belongs to a human rather than an automated process.
IP-2 — Permission/Decision Gate Law: This law enforces the separation between the decision function and the permission function. The ability to compute an action (“can we?”) is distinct from the authority to perform it (“may we?”). Even when a decision is fully determined, permission remains denied until legitimate authority is verified. This gate prevents action without authorization and functions as the lock that resists both automation creep and adversarial bypass.
IP-3 — Code-for-Good Inversion Design Law: This law enforces the inversion that moral intent or “doing good” is insufficient to justify action without declared human authority. Any exercise of power must explicitly state who may act, upon whom, under whose authority, for what purpose, and within what constraints. This design law preserves human dignity and agency by preventing authority from being hidden inside process, automation, or safeguarding claims. Evasion-resistance and red-team robustness emerge as consequences of this enforced authority clarity, not as the primary goal.
We forensically mapped the same logical failure across ten domains. Each shadow demonstrates how undeclared authority creates institutional dysfunction:
In every case, the absence of declared authority frames creates the same failure pattern: power exists but cannot be named, and therefore cannot be contested.
These red-team defenses do not create authority or determine outcomes; they expose attempts to bypass the authority constraints enforced by IP-1, IP-2, and IP-3.
We provide the following patches for institutional evasion:
These defenses are not negotiable. They are the minimum requirements for legitimate governance.
The only teen-led team to be invited to, participated in, and endorsed through the UN Global Digital Compact process.
The DTC implements the Inclusive Lifelong Multistakeholder Model (ILMM), which recognizes that authority must be distributed across life stages with explicit decision frames:
The DTC proves the 3 Primitives work. Authority is declared. Power is named. Dignity is non-negotiable.
Learn more at:
dynamicteencoalition.orgSystems Architect · Governance Practitioner · Co-Chair, Dynamic Teen Coalition
Stacy Gildenston is a systems architect and governance practitioner with three decades of experience designing, teaching, and standardising complex technical systems in safety-critical contexts where downstream failure carries technical, social, ecological, or intergenerational consequences.
Stacy Gildenston is a systems architect and governance practitioner with three decades of experience spanning industrial and instructional systems engineering, semiconductor and network infrastructure training, professional certification and standards development, aerospace and robotics education, ecological governance, and global digital policy.
She was engaged as the instructional systems engineer for the AC6000 diesel engine advanced electrical maintenance course, translating safety-critical industrial systems into structured, auditable instructional architecture. She later designed and developed the first online training portal for semiconductor equipment manufacturer Semitool, and led company-wide technical training on contract for Greenwich Tech Partners, a New York–based firm serving finance-sector clients.
Stacy served as Director of Certification for the Linux Professional Institute, SAGE / USENIX, and Cabletron Systems, overseeing competency frameworks, assessment integrity, and professional standards in high-stakes technical environments.
Her aerospace and education work includes founding Melbourne Combat Robotics, initiating and supporting multiple university-level rocketry teams, serving as Vice President of the Melbourne Amateur Rocket Society, and running the F1 Grand Prix rocketry display for the Australian Defence Force—emphasising hands-on systems understanding, aerospace literacy, and public engagement with complex technical domains.
A Master Naturalist and Watershed Steward through the University of Arizona, she initiated climate and governance work with the Hopi and Navajo Nations in collaboration with the Grand Canyon Trust. She is a 2003 World Summit on the Information Society Award recipient and serves as Co-Chair of the Dynamic Teen Coalition.
Stacy is the architect of the Inclusive Lifelong Multistakeholder Model (ILMM) and co-creator of the Upstream Safety System (USS), a deterministic, auditable governance architecture designed to embed safety, dignity, agency, and accountability upstream—before harm occurs. Her work focuses on making safety-critical systems legible, auditable, and governable at scale.
Lead Developer · Systems Builder · Co-Chair, Dynamic Teen Coalition
Pyrate Ruby Passell is the co-originator of the Upstream Safety System (USS), responsible for developing, implementing, and black-box testing all technical components of the USS demo, translating governance theory into a working, auditable system.
Pyrate Ruby Passell is co-originator of the Upstream Safety System (USS), responsible for the full deterministic architecture, Python codebase, API surfaces, and validation logic, and for black-box testing the system end to end.
She is co-designer of the Inclusive Lifelong Multistakeholder Model (ILMM), contributing to the articulation and practical testing of a lifespan-based governance framework that enables age-aware participation without surveillance, moderation, or automation, and that underpins the USS architecture.
As Co-Chair of the Dynamic Teen Coalition, Pyrate was invited to participate in and endorsed through the UN Global Digital Compact process as part of a formal teen-led team, contributing to consultations on emerging technologies, inclusion, and governance design.
She was selected as a mentor through the International Telecommunication Union for the UN’s first Citiverse Challenge, supporting university teams working at the intersection of virtual worlds, governance, and emerging technology.
Pyrate has been recognised by the UN Foundation as its first Changemaker under the age of 18, and as a Friend of the Open Quantum Institute at CERN, for contributions to discussions and workstreams connecting quantum technologies, governance, and the Global Digital Compact.
She built and operated the first digital governance Discord servers used at the United Nations, establishing the operational governance model for the Dynamic Teen Coalition in 2023–2024, extending that framework to the ITU Citiverse Challenge in 2025, and shaping collaboration architectures later adopted within the UN Foundation’s Our Future Agenda.
Her work sits at the boundary where governance theory becomes executable system design, turning principles such as dignity, agency, and human authority into architectures that can be built, tested, and defended under real-world conditions.
To "break" the 3 Primitives, you must provide a formal proof of a system that can bridge the gap from signal to action without an undeclared authority frame.
Requirements:
We may respond to selected submissions.
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