Registration Regime Theory: How Power Endures Through Time A Conceptual Framework for Writing, Numbers, Money, and Code as Temporal Technologies of Rule

This article presents Registration Regime Theory, a conceptual framework that explains the endurance of power through time by foregrounding the infrastructures of record-making and registration. Classic accounts of historical continuity often privilege a triad of forces—military coercion, economic organization, and ideological legitimacy. Registration Regime Theory does not deny these dimensions, but argues that they do not, on their own, explain why claims (property, debt, status, entitlement) remain binding across generations, why institutions outlive founders, or why inequality can persist even as regimes, markets, and belief systems mutate. The framework proposes a fourth dimension: registration power—the capacity to detach claims from mortal bodies and embed them into durable, transferable, enforceable records that stabilize social order over time. The article traces an evolutionary sequence of registration forms—writing, numbers, money, and code—and argues that contemporary algorithmic systems intensify registration by converting archival traces into automated decisions that pre-allocate opportunities and waiting times. The theory contributes to interdisciplinary debates in social theory, political philosophy, media theory, and digital governance by re-centering archives, documentation, and computational classification as primary mechanisms of structural continuity.