autonomous or captured

The political hinge of the whole set, and the resolution of an apparent contradiction. Boundary failure looks liberating in one register — dissolution as release from a rigid binary — and extractive in another, where unresolved sorting is a designed condition producing exhaustion. Both cannot be true of the same phenomenon.

They are not. The variable is not the failure but its ownership: *who maintains the boundary, and who bears the cost when it goes.* The mimetic insect in self/world dissolves on its own terms and no one profits. A monitor's alarm fatigue is a cost borne by one person and produced by a design serving an efficiency she has no share in. So boundary failure is neither generative nor extractive in itself — it becomes one or the other depending on whether the collapse is autonomous, working itself out on its own terms, or captured, engineered and sustained for value that never returns to whoever experiences it.

The position this yields is neither affirmation nor critique but *de-instrumentalisation*: isolating the mechanism from the apparatus that harvests it, in objects that sell nothing and optimise for no return visit, so that the question can be asked in the other direction. What does the same unresolved feeling become when nobody profits from the failure to close it?