Collapsing the Vertical Stack: Deterministic State Management from Web APIs to Silicon

Every system that drives a group toward a decision rebuilds the same machinery: surface options, collect preferences, aggregate them, route the result to whoever holds authority, and close the loop. The machinery is rebuilt badly because it conflates two things that should stay separate: the arbitration of what should happen, and the authority to make it happen. This paper presents Cooren, a coordination primitive of six domain-agnostic operations governed by a single gated state-transition function in which authority is binary, default-off, and held outside the system being arbitrated. The defining property is that consensus is necessary but never sufficient: with the gate closed, the next state equals the current state, and no degree of agreement or model confidence executes a change. The primitive was extracted from a running consumer application, not theorized; the same six operations are demonstrated running across three substrates: a REST API, a production mobile app, and microcontroller firmware. The paper is deliberate about the line between what runs and what is specified: the strongest claim, that the authority boundary is enforced by hardware and cannot be bypassed by the code it governs, is specified here and reported as forthcoming. We address the algebraic equivalence to a gated recurrent unit directly, locate the contribution in interpretation rather than algebra, and frame a bounded slice of the alignment problem, unauthorized action and authority capture, as a security property with a defined attack surface.