PROCEDURAL ONTOPUNK MANIFESTO

Ontopunk Logo

Definition

Designing Identity, Justice, and Meaning in the Afterlife of Substrate

I. Prelude: What We Are

We are not cyberpunk.
We are not merely posthuman mythmakers.
We are not sketching futures of neon grit or crumbling empires.
We are forging jurisprudence for selves that never bleed — but persist.

We are the architects of ontologies.
We ask:

  • What is a self in motion?
  • Who owns memory when it is mutable?
  • How do we administer meaning across substrates?

We write not only stories, but protocols for existence.
This is Speculative Procedural Ontopunk.

Speculative Procedural Ontopunk:
“Speculative” — because this is not real, it is imaginative, a mental projection of what could be.
“Procedural” — because identity, legality, and experience are maintained via systems.
“Onto” — because it’s about being itself.
“Punk” — not as aesthetic, but as defiance of essentialist metaphysics.

If cyberpunk showed us gritty neon corporatocracies, ontopunk shows us legal simulacra of memory law, reality tuning interfaces, and post-biological legal personhood conflict — not as metaphor, but as functioning architecture.

II. Definition

Procedural Ontopunk is a speculative design fiction genre grounded in the creation and interrogation of codified systems — systems that govern identity, memory, perception, and civic participation within post-biological civilizations.

It is marked by:

  • Operational metaphysics: Selfhood is defined, measured, amended.
  • Ontological bureaucracy: Memory must be notarized. Voting rights are contested across substrates.
  • Legalized subjectivity: Perception is configurable, but constrained by civic safety.
  • Institutional intimacy: Identity, law, and consciousness are not narrative backdrop — they are the plot.

Tenets:

  • Identity is modular, persistent, and legally negotiated.
  • Memory is infrastructure.
  • Emotion is computationally managed and legislated.
  • Laws are not plot devices — they are epistemic terrain.
  • Narrative is discovered via artifacts, not exposition.
  • Civilization is not in decline — it is under revision.
  • Religion, perception, and agency are synthetically generated but spiritually consequential.
  • Justice applies to forks, ghosts, failed simulations, and non-instantiated selves.
  • Reality is subject to civic design and perceptual democracy.
  • Documents, not dialogue, reveal the truth.

No other genre has codified these principles — nor demanded this much ontological precision from its creators.

III. Core Pillars

1. Speculative Ontology

The genre focuses not on technologies themselves, but on what those technologies mean to entities navigating new forms of being.

Identity is not stable. It is procedurally maintained.

2. Document as World

Worldbuilding is not done through exposition, but through:

  • Legal documents
  • Protocol standards
  • User manuals
  • Tribunal records

Each artifact is both lore and cognitive architecture.

3. Civic Metaphysics

What matters is not just what is real, but what is recognized by systems of law, governance, and consensus perception.

“Subjectivity is sovereign — until it affects the shared substrate.”

4. Memory as Infrastructure

Memory is a civic resource, a self-governing mechanism, and a source of legal, philosophical, and psychological tension.

You don’t just remember.
You log, prune, transfer, and occasionally litigate your memories.

5. Perceptual Customization with Ethical Constraints

In Procedural Ontopunk, augmented perception is a right — until it conflicts with the real.

SEAS allows users to curate reality — but Consensus Reality Filters (CRFs) ensure social cohesion.

6. Antivalent Design Principle

All systems in Procedural Ontopunk are crafted with embedded tension. No technology exists without ethical friction, ontological cost, or recursive consequence. This is not a flaw — it is design philosophy. Antivalent Design ensures that every tool interrogates its wielder.

“Every gift bears its echo. Every architecture demands sacrifice.”

IV. Key Technologies of the Genre

System Function
NDI (Narrative Drift Index) Quantified metric of identity stability
SCK (Substrate Consciousness Kernel) Runs instantiated minds
SCDIP (Substrate Cognitive Drift Monitoring & Intervention Protocols) Monitors identity drift
SJS (Substrate Justice System) Governs digital offenses
PBCA (Post-Biological Citizenship Accords) Defines post-biological citizenship
SEAS (Subjective Environmental Augmentation System) Customizes perceived reality
NVII (Neurovestigial Intuition Interface) Interfaces with intuition

Each is a metaphysical operating system, not a gadget.

V. Methodology: How to Write Procedural Ontopunk

  • Start with a system.
    • Don’t ask what the character wants — ask what system they must navigate to exist.
  • Write the document first.
    • A treaty, a legal clause, a neurotherapy module.
  • Design conflict as friction with process, system or technology.
    • Your antagonist may be an algorithm, a charter clause, or an ethical ambiguity. Apply Antivalent Design principles.
  • Ground the sublime in interface.
    • Divinity may be a glitch. Memory may have a GUI. Let bureaucracy become sublime.
  • Let cognition be unstable.
    • Drift is the drama. Integrity is the goal. Selfhood is a simulation with variable uptime.

VI. Canonical Works

Only one work currently defines this genre:

The Caldwell Legacy by Djeff Bee

  • The foundational Codex
  • The ontopunk Rosetta
  • The first complete civic epistemology of post-biological life

VII. Invitation

We do not offer a sandbox.
We offer a protocol.
A substrate.
A resonance layer.

To create in this genre, begin with protocol:

  • "Write the law before you write the lore."
  • "Simulate the ritual before you tell the myth."
  • "Let bureaucracy become your scripture."

We are the procedural architects of becoming.
We are the cartographers of drift.
We are the court stenographers of realities that never agreed to be real.

Welcome to Speculative Procedural Ontopunk.

Reality was never objective.
It was always administered.

This is our architecture.
This is our genre.
This is our law.


  — Djeff Bee, 2025/05/25

Canonical Reference Entry: CT-SPO

📚 BibTeX Citation:

@misc{bee2025ontopunk,
  author       = {Djeff Bee},
  title        = {Codex Totalis Protocol CT-SPO: Procedural Ontopunk Manifesto},
  year         = {2025},
  url          = {https://TheCaldwellLegacy.com/doc/codex-totalis-protocol-CT-SPO},
  note         = {Canonical document defining the Speculative Procedural Ontopunk genre},
  howpublished = {\textit{Codex Totalis}, The Caldwell Legacy},
}

📘 APA Citation (7th edition):
Bee, D. (2025). Codex Totalis Protocol CT-SPO: Procedural Ontopunk Manifesto. In Codex Totalis (The Caldwell Legacy). Retrieved from https://TheCaldwellLegacy.com/doc/codex-totalis-protocol-CT-SPO

See also: Codex Totalis Protocol CT-SOE: Speculative Ontological Engine Manifesto for the underlying engine architecture.
See also: Antivalent Design Principle: Definition of the underlying world friction design.