The Recognition–Reconstruction “information weapon” for authority integrity audit
An AI tool to help you check for f*ckery by bureaucrats
On my X profile I somewhat cheekily have given myself the honorary title of “Professor of Mischief”. This post is 100% aligned with that purpose! I hope it is exceptionally productive misbehaviour.
What I am sharing is a prototype audit tool that lets you check, forensically, whether a given official document can be reconstructed back to the sources of authority it claims.
I am using PDF as the container for the payload of “vibeware” — text as code — even though it may not be the ideal format. The important thing is that you can give the tool and an official document to an AI and ask it to perform the audit.
In other words, I am giving you something to point at authority and ask: does this thing actually reconstruct?
This is the operationalisation of the ideas in my companion intro article, Recognition is not enough.
Recognition is not enough
What follows is designed to be useful, not merely interesting. It is an AI-generated synthesis of the work I have been doing on Recognition–Reconstruction Theory.
To use the tool, upload the artefact you want to examine — say, a court order — together with enough supporting material to locate it properly in context. This matters because an artefact may be perfectly internally consistent while the broken authority structure only becomes visible when you reconstruct where it came from, what preceded it, and what it depends upon.
Then give the R–R tool to the AI and ask it to apply the audit and give you the readout.
That’s it.
I hope you create havoc with it, in the best possible way.
In the past, I might have made an effort to capture the economic value of an output like this. This has taken me weeks of effectively full-time work to create, and I still haven’t even posted out the photographs from my July art fundraiser. I don’t yet have my end-of-month rent saved up, never mind the monthly shakedown from the Government Legal Department for costs that I believe I should never have faced in the first place.
So I am hardly giving this away because I have no need for the money.
I am giving it away because I think the greater value lies elsewhere.
If this tool works, its purpose is to make forensic scrutiny of authority cheaper, faster and more widely available. Putting a tollbooth in front of it would work against the thing I am actually trying to achieve.
There are some technologies whose value is best captured by owning them. There are others whose value is best realised by letting them escape.
Feel free to reverse-engineer what I have done, improve it, adapt it, or build a better tool yourself. I would be delighted if this work became obsolete because somebody took the underlying ideas further.
I am releasing the tool under the Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) licence. In plain English: copy it, share it, modify it and experiment with it — just credit the source and don’t commercially exploit it without permission.
If you want to apply it commercially, drop me a line and let’s make it official.
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