What Habermas Would Reject by Construction

See the folder README for orientation. This file lists the structural features of mainstream platforms that a Habermas-inspired alternative cannot have.

Working backward from the refeudalization diagnosis and the ideal speech situation, the following are ruled out by construction:

• Engagement-optimised algorithmic feeds. They favour strategic action over communicative action, manufacture inflammation, and reduce participants to audience.
• Advertising as primary revenue. Makes user attention the product; creates a structural interest in fragmentation, addiction, and surveillance.
• Status display as a primary affordance. Follower counts, verified badges, like counts, viral metrics — these are forms of representational publicness, not opinion-formation.
• Lord-controlled identity and moderation. Unilateral terms, opaque enforcement, no appeal. The opposite of Lockean consent and Habermasian non-coercion.
• Personalisation that breaks shared exposure. A public sphere requires roughly common reference; algorithmic individuation destroys that condition.
• Behavioural surveillance. The user-as-feedstock arrangement is incompatible with the Kantian end-in-themselves principle the framework inherits.

That negative list is most of the work. The positive design — the eight moves/ — follows from it.