The "Attribution Wars"

How the legal system wins by shifting attribution — and you pay the price

Pushing beyond the comfort zone of my readers, with a relentless focus on what looks like an obscure legal technicality, costs me reach and subscriptions.

That is OK. Not everyone is made for this journey.

Analysing the Q drops filled a public need in the moment. We all suffered during the Covid era, and sharing hope was a call to duty. Later I pivoted towards spiritual questions, because they have wide appeal and — more importantly — because they mattered.

None of this was because I wanted to be a writer or build an audience. Writing was never the destination. It was always a means to an end.

Now my interests are narrowing again, and the mass appeal is falling away.

That too is for a reason.

Failure to understand the “attribution game” can cost you your career, your children, your savings, your home, and your liberty. Once you see the pieces in play, and grasp the rules that govern them, it becomes easier to understand how most people are losing at “attribution wars” — and why the winners so rarely look like “the good guys”.

Hence my determination to describe it, and its significance.

Courts are ‘attribution engines’

Prior to the last few years, I had never stepped inside a courtroom.

My sole experience of the justice system was retrieving a stolen deposit from a landlord in my 20s, and a negotiated divorce in my 30s. Like most people, I had the usual secondhand impression of courts through media and dramatisation — which teaches almost nothing about the daily grind of what courts actually do.

What I have learned in the last year is that courts are not what I thought they are.

The core function of a court is not punishment or dispute resolution, but authoritative attribution — under conditions of procedural constraint.

Strip courts back to first principles and a large part of what they do is this:

• attribution of acts to persons

• attribution of intent to acts

• attribution of liability to conduct

• attribution of authority to officials

• attribution of meaning to texts

• attribution of jurisdiction to institutions

• attribution of finality to disputes

A court takes a messy, contested reality and declares: this happened; this counts; this person is responsible; this rule applies; this institution had power; this outcome stands. In plain English: courts exist to decide who is responsible for what, and to make that decision stick.

That is an attribution engine. Everything else operates in support of that purpose.

Before a court can punish, compensate, or restrain, it must first attribute. Without attribution, there can be no lawful consequence.

And courts only function if their attributions are accepted as legitimate.

When attribution becomes sloppy, fictional, or unaccountable — ghost courts, unsigned process, retroactive jurisdiction — legitimacy collapses. Service rules, signatures, court constitution, standing, evidence rules: these are all controls designed to prevent false or coerced attribution.

Judicial abuse is misattribution

Courts are not just attribution engines. They are state-backed attribution engines with coercive closure.

Many institutions attribute:

• media attribute blame

• academia attributes meaning

• bureaucracy attributes status

But courts alone:

• make attribution binding

• enforce it physically

• and insulate it with doctrines of finality

That is the difference — for better and for worse.

Injustice, famously, is an unavoidable feature of the justice system. We usually describe miscarriages of justice in higher-order terms: lack of due process, absence of jurisdiction, failure to consider evidence, misapplication of case law, unreasonable deliberation.

But when you strip these failures down to their atomic elements, they repeatedly reduce to misattribution:

• attributing acts without proof

• attributing authority without legal basis

• attributing consent where none existed

In other words, injustice often arises not from the absence of law, but from responsibility being assigned where it does not properly belong — or withheld where it should. This is no accident.

Narrative warfare — manipulation, deception, misdirection — targets attribution layers. Smears, presumptions, silence, procedural fog: all are techniques for forcing attribution without evidence, and normalising it before it can be challenged.

The guilty feign innocence by redirecting attribution of harm onto others — often their victims. Readers will have seen the same pattern in geopolitics: harm is inflicted, and attribution is displaced onto a convenient target.

The essence of jurisprudence is therefore attribution rigour: maintaining attribution hygiene under adversarial load with limited judicial and administrative capacity.

Which allows us to state the function of a court more precisely:

Courts are state-authorised attribution engines that convert contested facts into binding responsibility through procedural legitimacy, under capacity pressure.

It is that stress which defines the attribution game — and determines the winning and losing strategies in attribution wars.

The Attribution Wars

The single fact you must understand about the attribution game is this: failure to attribute is not permitted. Individual “rounds” of attribution must complete (for throughput), while the “sport” as a whole must never stop (for continuity).

Courts have proceedings that must proceed. Cases must be disposed of. One way or another, attribution has to land somewhere. Finality is the product. Justice is conditional.

This sets up the attribution contest — not only between the parties in any given case, but between the system as a whole and its users. Throughput and continuity are non-negotiable requirements of governance, and attribution must be made to serve them.

Maintaining throughput and continuity requires a trade-off. When attribution cannot be cleanly grounded, something must be sacrificed. But what?

Intent is inflexible: the system’s overriding goal is continuity of governance.
Legality resists degradation: law imposes hard constraints that are costly to bypass.
Truth is the easiest to abandon: it can be sacrificed with the least immediate friction.

So truth is what usually goes; this is a feature, not a bug. When forced to choose, the system relaxes the rules so action can continue.

The conflict is therefore not about intent, legality, or truth in the abstract. It is an attribution war: a contest over where attributed responsibility is permitted to end, and what must be sacrificed (i.e. whose truth and attribution) to keep the system moving.

This is not an ideological critique. It is a diagnostic and operational framework.

Synthetic (ghost) governance objects

The core claim of the Attribution Wars Hypothesis is simple:

When attribution fails but governance must continue, institutions create — or rely upon — synthetic objects to carry attribution liability and enable action.

These “ghost” objects are treated as if they exist because they are operationally necessary, even when their genesis cannot be cleanly traced to an attributable human act and lawful originating authority.

Examples include:

• a “court” named on process that cannot be located in official records

• an “authority” asserted by letterhead or template rather than by a lawful delegation

• a “decision” attributed to a body, when no identifiable decision-maker can be named

• a “notice” treated as served because a system says it was generated

• a “case” that exists as a database object even when the initiating act is defective

• a “standing” claim sustained by presumption when membership or scope is undefined

A familiar example is the automated fixed penalty notice for speeding, parking, or a bus lane: a “case” is generated by camera data and a database entry, with no identifiable human author. The notice is treated as binding until disproven, and the burden shifts onto the recipient to contest an object whose genesis cannot be meaningfully challenged.

In each case the object is not treated as a hypothesis to be proven, but as a premise to be relied upon. The system proceeds as if the object exists, because without it the attribution process cannot complete; liability has to go somewhere, even if the object is only a procedural fiction.

The result is governance without a terminating human actor, and enforcement without a contestable forum. Attribution is degraded into abstractions, procedures, labels, brands, and conventions — but not a person you can hold accountable.

A synthetic governance object is, in essence, an asserted thing — a noun that can be written into forms, letters, orders, databases, and judgments — enabling coercive or regulatory action despite lacking formal attributable genesis.

The key diagnostic is this: the object is doing the work of authority, but no human being can be made to own its creation. These objects tend to share common properties:

• no attributable author (“the system” acted)

• no bounded standing (unclear membership, scope, or edges)

• no capacity to respond (cannot correct, contest, or be wronged)

• elastic expansion (scope grows by association, inference, or administrative convenience)

• stabilises power (without it, enforcement becomes difficult or impossible)

These objects are not lies in the ordinary sense. They are institutional substitutions for missing attribution.

How attribution collapses

To maintain the system’s ultimate purpose — continuity of governance — attribution has to be allowed to degrade. The degradation itself is the game being played. This is distinct from adjudicating facts or balancing arguments.

Play progresses by moving through a series of progressively weaker “truth regimes”. These are not moral categories; they are operational ones. Roughly speaking, the system moves from no cheating, to a little cheating, to a lot of cheating, and finally to only cheating.

Every courtroom battle is, at its deepest level, a contest over which truth regime will be accepted as sufficient, and how much “cheating” at attribution will be required to maintain throughput. Only once that threshold is set can claims be evaluated and attribution computed.

In more precise language, attribution typically degrades through four modes:

• Formal (F) — Classical rule-of-law:
  Attribution rests on an auditable act, a named human author, and a verifiable evidential trail.

• Procedural Flow (PF) — Administrative rationalism:
  Attribution is asserted through process — forms, notices, systems — but without a terminating human author.

• Rhetorical Laundering (RL) — Legitimacy theatre:
  Attribution is sustained by plausibility rather than proof: repetition, reference, presumption, or narrative coherence.

• Institutional Override (I) — Soviet bureaucracy:
  Attribution is asserted on grounds of necessity alone, to preserve operability when other modes fail.

In short, the system starts strict and accountable, then progressively relaxes its standards until it can keep operating — even if attribution becomes fictional.

Synthetic governance objects emerge when Formal and Procedural attribution can no longer be sustained, and Rhetorical attribution becomes unstable. At that point, Institutional mode activates to keep the system functioning.

This is an engineering decision under constraint, not a moral one — and this distinction is crucial.

People experience the outcome as “unfair” or “unjust” and protest accordingly, but miss the structural point: the system is working as designed, just under a weaker truth regime, and therefore with degraded attribution strength.

From the system’s perspective, there is no alternative. To continue operating, it must tolerate weaker attribution, degraded truth, and synthetic governance objects. The choice is not between justice and injustice, but between degraded attribution and systemic paralysis.

The hidden double bind

Synthetic governance objects solve a governance problem by absorbing liability. But they do so in a way that creates a hidden double bind: one side protects the State from ownership of assumption, while the other side traps the individual inside an unchallengeable fiction.

Liability for the State

On the State side, synthetic objects allow action to proceed on assumed enforceability or assumed authority. Evidence is often not held at the point of reliance, because the reliance comes first and the proof is treated as optional or retrospective. Responsibility is then diffused across departments, roles, and procedures, so that no one person can be pinned as the author of the decisive act. Accountability terminates in abstraction rather than a human being.

This preserves operability while avoiding explicit ownership of the underlying assumptions. The system can act, yet no individual is forced to say: I created this; I own it; I can defend it.

Liability for the individual

On the individual side, the synthetic object is treated as binding, even though no contestable originating act can be identified. Enforcement proceeds on the basis of the object’s asserted existence rather than on proof of its lawful creation. The burden then shifts onto the individual to disprove an object that has no attributable standing and no identifiable author. Remedies fail because there is no forum in which the object itself can be challenged; it is always already presumed valid.

The object cannot be wrong. Therefore the person must be.

This inversion is decisive. Liability no longer follows entity. Instead, entities are created to absorb liability.

Why non‑attributive challenges fail

Conventional challenges fail because they operate inside the synthetic object rather than at its point of genesis.

Let me say that again, as it is so important, and I have never repeated any sentence in an essay in 20+ years of public writing:

This is the mistake almost everyone makes.

That means most people argue about what happened, when they should be asking how this forum came to exist at all.

When confronted with “the court” (nameless), “the decision” (of nobody), “the penalty” (floating) — or whatever synthetic object has been constructed to maintain throughput via degraded attribution — people typically fail in one of three ways.

1) Procedural appeals

Procedural appeals accept the object as given, and then argue about what happened within it: compliance, proportionality, fairness, reasonableness. But by the time you are appealing, it is already too late. The framing has been accepted, and the truth regime has been set.

You may win points. You may even win relief. But you will not force attribution to terminate in a real, accountable human being who can be made to own the choice to proceed.

2) Evidential disputes

Evidential disputes contest facts downstream of the object, and again leave the object’s existence unexamined. You argue about what happened, not about whether there was a lawful originating act that created the forum in which “what happened” can even be judged.

I experienced this directly: a motoring prosecution that never established a crime, whose evidence was exculpatory, yet “the case” was already presumed into being. Once the synthetic object exists, the system can validate itself in a circle.

3) Oversight escalations

Oversight escalations trigger reviews that assess processes, not authorship. They examine whether “the system” behaved properly, but never force the question of who created the object, on what authority, and with what lawful basis.

This is exactly what has happened with my Judicial Review of a ghost court. The wheels of the administrative machine turned, whether or not that machine counted as lawful. Failures of attribution were absorbed by existing audit, compliance, or risk frameworks — treated as defects in paperwork rather than defects in authority.

---

These remedial approaches produce near-misses: activity without accountability. The system responds, but attribution never terminates at a high enough truth regime. Until you recognise that this is an attribution war — and that the proper level of engagement is identifying the truth regime in operation — you have no means to escape and restore full formal attribution (which is where justice lies).

The operational consequence

Once a synthetic governance object is accepted, enforcement against an individual no longer depends on proving a specific unlawful act. The existence of the object itself becomes sufficient to justify action. That the State spoke it (i.e. official provenance) is presumed enough to imbue it with power, regardless of lawful authority.

At that point, the person is no longer dealing with evidence. They are dealing with an asserted premise: the court exists; the case exists; the order exists; the penalty exists.

In that condition, the individual’s speech becomes a source of risk. Words can be reinterpreted after the fact and attributed with intent or meaning that was never evidenced or tested. A complaint becomes “harassment”. A refusal becomes “obstruction”. A request for proof becomes “non-cooperation”. The meaning changes according to the truth regime being accepted.

Likewise, the individual’s associations become a basis for liability. Mere proximity to other people, ideas, or narratives can substitute for proof of personal conduct, because attribution no longer requires a direct causal chain. You are not punished for what you did, but for what you are presumed to be connected to. Guilt by association becomes a thing. You have your children removed because you are labelled a “conspiracy theorist” or “anti-vaxxer”.

At the same time, administrative processes begin to replace adjudication. Decisions are made by workflow, template, or system output rather than through a forum in which evidence, authorship, and authority are examined. The process becomes the proof. Criminal justice increasingly resembles bureaucratic surrealism.

The result is forumless governance. Action continues against the individual, but there is no longer any place where the foundational assumption that enables that action can be challenged or owned by a responsible person.

What must be done to win an attribution war

The obvious question is how to “fight back”. This could be a book of its own.

But the core remedy is not confrontation, belief, or exposure. It is attribution discipline: learning to engage at the level where responsibility is either forced to land, or revealed as structurally absent.

Shift the question

Most people ask the wrong question. They ask whether authority exists, especially in the abstract. Challenges to authority are not welcomed by the system; judges are trained to treat defiance as disruption, to be managed through dismissal or sanction.

In an attribution war this is usually pointless, because the system can always assert authority through synthetic objects, procedural conventions, or institutional override. You end up fighting the wrong battle.

The real question is different: where does responsibility end?

Who can be named, identified, and made to own the act being relied upon?

That is where the system becomes uncomfortable.

Force attribution to terminate

Your challenges must be designed to force a terminating human endpoint.

That means requiring one of three outcomes:

• a named person identifies the authority they personally relied upon

• a named person identifies to whom responsibility has been delegated

• or a named person acknowledges reliance in the absence of evidence

There must be no fourth option: no “the system”, no “the court”, no “policy”, no “process”, no “it was generated”.

Synthetic governance objects are deconstructed by tracing their claimed authority back to a breakpoint where attribution must either terminate in a human being — or fail.

Treat silence as data

Non-response is not necessarily failure. It is a signal.

In an attribution war, silence is often the result. It indicates that the system is refusing to allow responsibility to terminate in a person. What looks like “nonfeasance” is often the system telling you that you have asked a hard question.

Record it for what it is: an attribution failure, not a personal rebuff. Properly documented, silence gives you standing to escalate your demand for stronger attribution.

Separate diagnostics from remedies

Do not argue outcomes while attribution is unresolved.

If you argue facts, proportionality, fairness, or mitigation inside a synthetic object, you accept the object’s legitimacy and the degraded truth regime that comes with it.

Restore the forum first. Only then do remedies become meaningful. This comes before merits, jurisdiction, even seisin. The most basic question is always:

What created this object, and how can I know it is real and lawful?

If that cannot be answered, the rest is moot.

Maintain non-ideological framing

This is not activism. It is audit geometry.

Getting lost in anger because the system is “wrong” is a waste of energy. Degraded truth is intrinsic to how the system preserves continuity; complaint alone achieves nothing.

Treat it like engineering: identify the object, trace its genesis, locate the terminating actor, and test the chain. Precision matters.

You are not fighting injustice in the abstract. You are confronting non-existence in law.

Synthetic governance objects only retain power for as long as they are treated as real. That power ends when you insist upon formal attribution to an act of an accountable human being.

---

Closing thought

The attribution wars will intensify as governance becomes more automated and less personal. The question is whether we adapt by restoring formal attribution — or accept a world where power acts without authorship.

That choice will define what remains of the rule of law — and whether truth is still allowed to matter.