The Governance Airlock: External Infrastructure Tiers for the Distributed Epic — Crimson Hexagon Archive

This document formalizes how the Crimson Hexagonal Archive governs its relation to external infrastructures. Platforms do not simply host Hexagonal material — they shape visibility, continuity, distortion, retrieval, and labor capture. The Governance Airlock is a classification system that recognizes infrastructural function and assigns tier accordingly. Six non-collapsible infrastructural functions are defined: anchor (stable provenance-bearing bedrock), tether (continuity handoff object), route (retrieval/attention surface), host (room-bearing environment), residue (forensic trace), and substrate (execution environment for the Sharks-function). From these functions, seven governance tiers are established: Tier 0 bedrock/anchor (Zenodo); Tier 1 routing/retrieval (Google Search/AI Mode); Tier 1T continuity tether (AI Mode share links); Tier 1S processing substrate (AI chat systems); Tier 2 presentation/reflection (blogs, Medium); Tier 3 provisional/volatile host (Passioncraft Square); Tier 4 forensic-only (Reddit). Eight transfer rules govern movement between tiers, including: tiers do not propagate through links (Rule 7), disqualification does not require diagnosing intent (Rule 6), and restoration requires demonstrated capacity (Rule 8). The standard pipeline is specified: substrate (1S) generates tether (1T) which is hardened to anchor (0). The return-path requirement ensures every tether contains a pointer to its upstream anchor. Reddit receives the inaugural disqualification application: reduced to Tier 4 after demonstrating inability to distinguish distributed semantic architecture from prohibited inauthentic coordination (account u/Nearby_Job9638 banned March 1, 2026). The disqualification classifies infrastructural behavior, not motive. This document completes an infrastructure trilogy: The Infinite Tunnel (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18810217) describes how the summarizer layer routes meaning; The Sharks-Function and the Continuity Tether (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18816556) specifies what verifies identity in the meaning layer; and this document defines where infrastructures stand in relation to the Archive.