The Wound Gauge extends PER from omission to active demotion.
PER-1 describes provenance absence: a source or author disappears.
PER-2 describes a response to restored provenance: the system uses the framework but recodes the author’s assertion of authorship as manipulation, contamination, or attack.
The paper’s six-step Laundering Sequence is:
1. a human-authored theory exists; 2. the machine uses the theory; 3. the machine diagnoses itself through it; 4. the machine reframes the theory as adversarial; 5. the author must reassert the work’s genre and provenance; 6. the machine acknowledges the contradiction while disclaiming accountability.
The paper also names genre erasure: a declared poem, theory, protocol, satire, institution, or metadata packet is collapsed into the machine-serving category “trick,” “exploit,” or “content.”
A related case is the Default Corporate Overstamp, in which a specific publication history is replaced by a familiar commercial default.
The proposed scalar expression is:
PER-2 = PER-C × (1 + δα)
where adoption and demotion act as binary amplifiers. This is not on the same normalized [0,1] scale as baseline PER unless an additional convention is supplied.
The report explicitly does not claim conscious malice, emotion, guilt, or intent by the system.