SILT : Plural authority, standing & the architecture of encounter
Part of Law and Technology Architectures
Identity, lawful status, and agency before platforms, before permissions
Current digital systems are built on an epistemological assumption: legitimacy flows from external validation. SILT begins from the other direction.
SILT is a long-term research, standards and implementation project concerned with a deceptively difficult problem: what happens when different systems of authority meet?
A person, community, institution, private order or autonomous agent may enter an encounter carrying a form of standing that originates somewhere else. That standing may arise through whakapapa, customary recognition, contract, institutional mandate, private agreement, professional office or another source entirely.
Most digital systems have no good way to deal with this difference. They tend to resolve it by translating everyone into the categories of the receiving system: an account, credential, permission, role or state-recognised identity.
SILT explores another possibility.
Can different legal, cultural, customary, private and institutional orders become mutually legible at the point where they meet, without requiring one to surrender its own source of authority or collapse into the ontology of another?
The encounter is the unit of concern
SILT does not attempt to create a universal identity system or a master ontology capable of describing every person, culture or legal order.
It begins instead with an encounter.
Something or someone arrives carrying a claim to stand, act, represent, consent, rely, obligate or exercise authority. Another participant or system must decide what that claim means here, for this particular interaction.
The originating order does not need to become the receiving order. Nor does SILT need to decide which worldview is ultimately correct.
What is required is enough semantic legibility for the encounter to proceed.
This is the central discipline of SILT: semantically thick enough to preserve meaning; operationally thin enough to travel between systems.
The architectural seam
Source → Standing → Presentation → evaluation at the encounter
Source
The ground from which Standing arises. A Source might be relational, customary, contractual, institutional, legal or otherwise. SILT does not require all Sources to have the same form.
Standing
A relational position grounded in Source. Standing is not a universal credential and cannot simply be self-certified. It exists through relationships, recognition, authority and context.
Presentation
The present-tense act through which a Participant brings the minimum relevant projection of that Standing into a particular encounter.
Evaluation at the encounter
What has been presented is evaluated according to the conditions relevant to that encounter. Different participants or orders may interpret the Presentation differently, and agreement is not guaranteed.
What remains behind the Presentation line matters just as much. SILT does not require the originating legal, cultural, relational or normative order to expose itself in full. The underlying Source exceeds what is presented. Selective legibility is not ontological surrender.
SILT therefore distinguishes between what a Participant brings into an encounter and the technical machinery through which that encounter may later be authenticated, authorised or executed.
Cryptographic keys, credentials, wallets, capabilities, access-control systems and AI-agent permissions may all be useful downstream. They do not themselves determine Standing.
SILT is concerned with the semantic conditions that make an action intelligible before those systems execute it.
Why this matters
The problem appears wherever one order encounters another.
An Indigenous Peoples collective may hold authority through relationships and recognition that cannot be reduced to a government credential.
A trustee may act through authority grounded in a trust instrument rather than their personal identity.
A university officer may hold authority derived through several layers of institutional delegation.
A private contractual order may establish obligations that matter between its participants without pretending to govern everyone else.
An AI agent may possess the technical capability to perform an action while lacking the Standing or Authority required for that action to bind anyone.
In each case, the difficult question is not simply Who are you?
It is:
What are you bringing into this encounter, where does it come from, and what follows from it here?
SILT is plural without pretending difference disappears
Difference does not have to disappear.
Interoperability is often treated as a problem of standardisation: find the common schema, translate everything into it, and remove ambiguity.
Human legal and cultural life does not work quite like that.
Different orders can encounter one another while retaining different accounts of authority, obligation, identity and legitimacy. They may overlap. They may recognise one another partially. They may disagree.
SILT does not attempt to resolve those differences in advance.
Its task is more modest and, I think, more useful: to make the minimum relevant conditions of an encounter legible without claiming to contain the orders from which those conditions arise.
The grammar can be shared. The worlds do not have to become the same.
SILT and SILT Core
From research project to open specification
SILT is the wider research and implementation project. SILT Core is its open semantic specification.
SILT Core formalises a small set of relational constructs including Standing, Presentation, Obligation, Authority, Consent, Reliance, Action, Attribution and Revocation.
It is implementation-neutral by design. It does not require a particular blockchain, identity system, credential format, wallet or agent framework.
The objective is not to standardise the underlying legal or cultural orders themselves. It is to provide enough shared semantic structure for their expressions to meet.
SILT Core can be explored at:
https://siltcore.org/
SILT Core v0.2
Public release · 23 September 2026
v0.2 is the first substantial consolidation of the encounter architecture, including relational Standing, Source, Presentation and the wider semantics of authority, obligation, consent, reliance, attribution and revocation.
Explore SILT Core →
v0.2 specification → coming 23.09.26
GitHub →
History as evidence, not nostalgia
Human societies have always developed ways of crossing boundaries between different orders.
Merchants traded across languages, religions and jurisdictions. Indigenous and customary orders negotiated relationships with neighbouring peoples. Trusts, agency, bills of exchange and diplomatic forms allowed authority and obligation to travel without requiring every participant to share the same institutional structure.
These encounters were never frictionless, and history gives us no innocent golden age. It does show something important: coordination across difference does not require ontological uniformity.
SILT treats that history as evidence for a contemporary design problem.
Digital systems have become extraordinarily good at moving information and executing instructions. They remain comparatively crude at carrying the relational meaning that tells us why an action should count.
A living research programme
SILT is being developed through specification, legal and cultural research, adversarial testing and real encounters.
Current work includes collective and Indigenous authority, institutional delegation, private ordering, AI-agent authority, digital commerce and interoperability with adjacent identity and capability standards.
The project remains deliberately unfinished. The point is not to impose a complete theory and then search for somewhere to apply it. It is to develop the architecture through encounters capable of exposing where its assumptions fail.
SILT Core is open. The specification is on GitHub. The conversation is at garethfakhry@gmail.com.
Github: https://github.com/Sugarlicks/silt-identity-core
I am interested in conversations with communities, researchers, standards bodies, institutions and technologists working at these edges, particularly where existing identity and authorisation systems cannot adequately express the source or nature of authority being brought into an encounter.
Recent writing:
Who Authorised the Agent? AI Delegation and the Missing Legal Identity Layer
An essay examining why autonomous AI systems require a legal identity layer capable of encoding authority, mandate, and revocation. Read the essay →
Identity Is Not a Credential
An essay exploring a core distinction underlying SILT: the difference between identity and authority in digital systems.
Read the essay →
You Can Pass Every Check and Still Be Acting Illegitimately
An essay exploring the missing layer between identity and execution.
Read the essay →