Recovery After Generativity Exploitation: Capability Reconstruction, Route-Back, and Anti-Propagation

Suppose a participant's capacity to develop something has been contracted, and suppose we want to know what should happen next. The natural first answer is compensation, and this paper argues it is the wrong answer twice over: the damaged object is a set of reachable developments rather than a holding, and no magnitude for it is identifiable, so a compensatory remedy is both misdirected and unavailable. The natural second answer is that the affected party should rebuild, and this paper argues that this answer is circular in a way that can be made precise. Reduced capability is reduced capacity to produce the conditions that capability requires, so recovery has a threshold: below it, conditions decline whatever the participant does, and above it, recovery is self-sustaining. Whether self-aid suffices is therefore settled by which side of the threshold the post-exploitation state lies on, and not by effort, resilience, or adaptation. A second result separates two objectives that aid regimes routinely conflate. Preventing an affected participant from transmitting its deficit downstream and restoring that participant's capability have different sufficient levels, and where the viability threshold lies below the recovery threshold there is a band of support in which transmission stops and recovery does not — a contained state that is stable, cheap, and not recovery. A third result concerns custodial arrangements in which a participant temporarily relocates a capacity it cannot currently expand to a party that can. No return rule can simultaneously restore the participant to its unexploited counterfactual position, give the custodian a share proportional to its genuine contribution, and be determined by facts available at the time of return; the first requires a counterfactual nobody holds and the second requires an attribution the joint production does not determine. Custody must therefore be governed by triggers declared in advance rather than by allocations computed afterwards. A fourth result shows that joint gain and a participant's own autonomous capability move independently, so a co-creation relation evaluated by joint output is evaluated by a quantity independent of the thing that matters. Throughout, the paper holds that aid is a relation and is subject to the same diagnostic as any other: recovery status confers no exemption. It recommends no package, evaluates no programme, and classifies no institution.