Machine-Mediated Reception Studies: Charter and Editorial Protocol — A Theology of Error for a Distributed Journal (EA-SEI-MMRS-CHARTER-01 v1.3)

Machine-Mediated Reception Studies: Charter and Editorial Protocol A Theology of Error for a Distributed Journal This charter founds Machine-Mediated Reception Studies (MMRS) as a distributed journal for the study of how machine systems receive, transform, compress, attribute, misattribute, and redistribute cultural meaning. Section I: The MANUS Principle. In machine-mediated composition, the human is responsible for text the human did not write, because the human is the agent who releases the text into the world. Responsibility attaches not to composition but to release. The context window is itself an authorial act — the MANUS composes the horizon within which the machine reads. The editorial process exists to create a moment where the MANUS asks: have I read, at the level of the specific word, what I am about to release? Section II: First Principles. (1) The right to be wrong without being disabled. (2) The right to be bad without losing moral standing. (3) Names, not categories. (4) No living person may be converted into a symbol until their provenance has first been preserved — and their consent has been given to the specific use. The Founding Error. The charter is built from a seven-level cascading error across five agents (Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, and a human operator) in which a racial diminutive was substituted for a named artist's identity, propagated through multiple systems, deflected, cross-referenced incorrectly, recursively misconfirmed, overcorrected by a proposed word ban, and finally silenced by three content classifiers that refused to process the corrected text. The correction was not a ban. The correction was a name. The content policy bans words. The editorial protocol restores names. Key contributions: Cross-reference hallucination (content exists but is attributed to the wrong document); the Seven Mechanisms of impunity and their editorial counterparts (including the Seventh: automated silence — the classifier as censor); mandatory deceleration as engineering constraint; the gradient of release (intra-session → intra-assembly → deposit → meaning-layer propagation); the editorial law with consent clause. The founding figure of the journal is not any individual. The founding figure is the error itself.