Instruments

Fourteen claims, built to be run

The archive argues that institutions move cost, delay, and correction onto the people who depend on them. Each instrument takes one of those claims and makes the reader do what the claim describes, on a real case or your own.

It is happening to me

An insurer, an employer, an agency or a platform got you wrong, and you want to say exactly how.

  1. 02The justification linterFind the leap in an institution's justification
  2. 03Would you still choose it?Is this option real? Five tests for a choice that exists on paper
  3. 10Nobody signed thisFind who decided: trace a default, delay or algorithm to a signature
  4. 14Incomplete defensesIt's legal, accurate, optional: what each defense leaves open

I run a system

You design, run or review a service, a product or a policy, and you want to see where its errors land before someone else does.

  1. 04The signal meterCan a complaint change anything? A check for feedback channels
  2. 05After the finding landsAfter an appeal is won, does anything change? Nine checks
  3. 07The late recordHow long is the record about you wrong? Review cadence and who pays
  4. 08Same words, bigger toolHas a permission outgrown what it was granted for? A scope-creep check
  5. 11The remainder statementA design-doc section for what your rule leaves out
  6. 13The correction ladderPostmortem check: did the fix reach the level that failed?

I study this

You research, teach or write about institutions and want a method for reading them by their failures.

  1. 01The residual ledgerHow much of a shock reaches the person? Absorbed versus passed on
  2. 06Three ledgersSame budget, different burden: who does the work and who can correct it
  3. 09The remainder, and who flexesWhen a rule doesn't fit, who flexes? Rank and the remainder
  4. 12The residual readRead an institution through its workarounds and complaints

Everything runs in your browser. Each form is also a plain request, so every state is an address you can send to someone, and the address is the record: opening it sends that state back to the site. Typing sends nothing. What you type stays out of the address unless you ask for it. A run copies as Markdown for a design doc, an issue or a letter, and five of them come as templates, two as skills for AI assistants. Not sure which claim fits? The toolkit starts from what happened and names the pattern.

The instruments, templates, skills and glossary are free to reuse and adapt under CC BY 4.0, with credit to The Crumple Zone. The essays are not.