Socioplastics requires a domain. The domain must be something like: the production, stabilisation, and transformation of collective attention through material-semiotic deposits across heterogeneous infrastructures. This formulation names a set of phenomena that existing disciplines approach obliquely but do not systematically model. Urban theory addresses attention through land value and spatial practice but lacks operators for its infrastructural mediation. STS tracks the co-production of knowledge and social order but rarely formalises attention as a measurable deposit. Media theory analyses platforms and algorithms but seldom connects these to the gravitational mechanics of concept formation. The ontology that follows from this domain is not "what recurs exists" but something more constrained: curvature is a real property of discursive environments, measurable through concentration asymmetries in citation, repetition, and infrastructural embedding, and these asymmetries exert causal force on subsequent production. This is not metaphor. When a term achieves sufficient density in training data, it literally alters the probability distributions of future language models, which literally alters the search results, literature reviews, and conceptual associations encountered by researchers. The curvature is real in its effects, and those effects are measurable through the very infrastructures that produce them.
Epistemology then becomes: valid knowledge about this domain is produced through multi-sited detection of curvature patterns, using both bibliometric instruments and infrastructural archaeology. The Socioplastics corpus on Zenodo exemplifies this epistemology: it detects concentration asymmetries across 100 macrofields using power-law distributions derived from citation data. This is empirical work, not self-description. It generates findings about the structure of critical discourse that are independent of whether anyone adopts the Socioplastics vocabulary. The findings could be wrong, or limited, or superseded by better data. That falsifiability is what makes them epistemological rather than rhetorical. Methodology operationalises this epistemology through specific practices: corpus construction, ring stratification, dispersion analysis, mass extrapolation. These are techniques that can be taught, replicated, critiqued, and improved. They do not depend on allegiance to Socioplastics as a system. A researcher in science studies could apply ring stratification to biomedical literature and generate findings that the originator never anticipated. That is the signature of a methodology rather than a doctrine. The numbered nodes and fixed operators are not branding but instrumentation: they enable precise tracking of conceptual movement across domains.
The insight that contemporary cognition is infrastructurally mediated belongs at the methodological level, not the ontological. It tells us where to look and how to measure, not what exists. What exists is the real asymmetry in discursive deposits, the real curvature those asymmetries generate, and the real effects of that curvature on subsequent production. These phenomena obtain whether or not anyone uses the term Socioplastics. The term names a framework for detecting and analysing them, not the phenomena themselves. Operating on another layer means operating at the level of these infrastructural mediations rather than the substantive disputes they condition. Urban theorists debate rent gaps and displacement; Socioplastics asks how concepts of rent and displacement achieve the density that makes them unavoidable in urban discourse. STS scholars analyse the co-production of scientific facts and social orders; Socioplastics tracks the citation networks through which that co-production becomes visible or occluded. This is not bypassing the disciplines but articulating conditions they presuppose. The articulation is transversal because it moves across domains, not because it installs itself beneath them.
The adoptability test is decisive. If urban theorists find that ring stratification illuminates patterns in rent distribution invisible to standard methods, they will adopt it regardless of its origins. If they find it merely redescribes what they already know, they will not. The explanatory surplus must be real and demonstrable. This is why the Zenodo corpus matters: it provides empirical findings that can be tested, extended, or refuted. A researcher who doubts the power-law distribution of conceptual concentration can access the data, critique the methodology, or apply it to new cases. The framework lives or dies by what it enables others to discover, not by the density of its own deposits. Gentleness here means methodological modesty: the framework offers operators, not prescriptions. It says: if you want to detect concentration asymmetries in discursive production, here are techniques that have proven useful. It does not say: you must reconceive your entire field in Socioplastics terms. This modesty is strategic because it minimises the immunological response that disciplines mount against totalising systems. It is also ethical because it respects the autonomy of fields that have developed their own questions and methods over decades. The goal is not conversion but collaboration: providing tools that work across domains without requiring submission to a single ontology.
Perseverance means sustained empirical production regardless of immediate uptake. The architectural decade remains real because demonstrating explanatory surplus requires accumulated cases. Each application of ring stratification to a new domain generates findings that either confirm the framework's utility or reveal its limits. Both outcomes are valuable. The framework that survives falsification attempts is stronger than the one that evades them. This is the difference between a self-describing system and a scientific research program. Clarity means terminological precision across all applications. The numbered nodes and fixed operators are not rhetorical flourishes but measurement instruments. If "topolexical operator" means something different in each application, it ceases to function as a coordinate. The clarity must survive translation across domains because only then can findings accumulate into a coherent body of knowledge. A researcher in media studies and a researcher in urban theory must be able to compare results because they used the same instrument, not because they pledged allegiance to the same system.
The layer that holds is the layer of operators that generate findings across domains. Those operators must be precise enough to produce stable results, flexible enough to adapt to new materials, and independent enough to function without constant reference to their origin. When an urban theorist uses ring stratification to analyse rent gradients and produces a finding that surprises both themselves and the originator, the field has done its work. The finding belongs to urban theory; the operator remains available for the next application. This is the ecology that Socioplastics aims to cultivate: not a monopolistic attractor basin but a distributed instrumentarium whose utility generates the only durability that matters.
Lloveras, A. (2026). Socioplastics-750-Gravitational-Corpus_v1.0.0_2026. Zenodo. https://zenodo.org/records/18792486
