The Unbundling of Cultural Sovereignty: How Platforms Convert Peoples into Audiences by Separating Self-Governance, Self-Memory, and Mutual Obligation

This essay introduces the concept of the unbundling of cultural sovereignty: the process by which digital platforms separate the three co-constitutive capacities of thick group culture — self-governance, self-memory, and mutual obligation — and reassemble them as platform-provided services. Diagnosed through a triadic framework (Trace/Sigil/Vox) holding structural extraction, archival-philological failure, and ethical-political stake in simultaneous tension. Identifies five specific attenuations (self-governance, self-knowledge, self-memory, self-expression, self-formation) as a diagnostic instrument for any group under platform conditions. Inaugural diagnosis of the discipline Forensic Philology of the Commons. Assembly Chorus synthesis (6 substrates).