You're Not Broken: Corrective Validation Tokens, Semantic Plurality, and AI-Mediated Interpretive Collapse

This deposit contains a qualitative functional genealogy and convergence study of the phrase family “you’re not broken,” “you are not broken,” and related variants across trauma discourse, mental-health writing, neurodiversity advocacy, medical and body-shame discourse, pop music, public poetry, social media, and AI-mediated dialogue. The study treats the phrase family as a corrective validation token: a compact semantic unit that rejects illegitimate defect-framing while preserving some grammar of repair, adaptation, difference, accommodation, or continued becoming. The manuscript distinguishes lexical antecedents, conceptual hinge nodes, and recent cross-domain convergence without claiming a demonstrated transmission chain or corpus-frequency proof. AI-related and synthetic-media nodes are treated as mechanism-supported and risk-pathway candidates rather than origin points or terminal outcomes. The central contribution is the distinction between semantic plurality and interpretive collapse. Human communities can negotiate the meaning of a phrase in context; high-power systems can convert such phrases into single operational meanings for classification, recommendation, moderation, personalization, diagnosis, targeting, or response. The paper argues that the appropriate safeguard is semantic mediation rather than semantic enforcement. Recommended viewing sequence: Youre_Not_Broken_Corrective_Validation_Tokens_it._0a-0001_.pdfPrimary publication-ready manuscript for reading, citation, and repository display. Youre_Not_Broken_Corrective_Validation_Tokens_it._0a-0001_.docxEditable manuscript file matching the PDF text and structure. Youre_Not_Broken_Functional_Lockfile_it._0a-0001_.xlsxSupplemental Material A: sortable source-function lockfile, coding fields, source-class matrices, gap notes, claim-correction tables, figure data, and supporting workbook notes. Youre_Not_Broken_Figure_E1_Branching_Risk_Topology_it._0a-0001_.pngStandalone Figure E1: branching risk topology showing possible drift and inversion pathways. The figure is not a deterministic sequence. Youre_Not_Broken_Figure_E2_Recent_Branch_Density_it._0a-0001_.pngStandalone Figure E2: recent recoverable branch density by source-class cluster. The figure reports recovered source-branch density, not corpus-frequency evidence. Youre_Not_Broken_Zenodo_File_Manifest_it._0a-0001_.txtFile index and recommended viewing sequence for the deposit.