Each episode is a node. Each arrow is a documented, modeled, or speculative mechanism connecting one to the next. The Mechanism Series is not a series of essays — it's one map of how the systems sorting modern life feed each other. Click any node to enter.
Season I (left) maps the institutional pressure that produces sortable signal — eviction filings, hospital records, voter-roll churn, insurance-driven migration. Season II (right) maps how that signal becomes price — the composite, the feed, the trust score. The two are not separate publications. They are the same circuit photographed from opposite sides.
Both seasons run through the same four companies (Meta, Google, Apple, Amazon) plus a broker tier (Acxiom, Experian, LexisNexis, CoreLogic). That shared substrate is what makes the two seasons one publication rather than two. It's the bottleneck. It's also the leverage point.
The tenant-scoring pipe between eviction filings and the broker tier is one example. The ad-tech bidder between the substrate and the Feed Engine is another. These are not inferences — they are documented, cited, and listed in the Claims Atlas.
The Trust Market → Personhood feedback (your trust score becoming part of your composite) is the one we model as speculative. It may or may not become true in the next five years. Read the dashed lines as hypotheses. If they materialize, we'll relabel them. If they don't, we'll publish why.