Effective Act: Abolition of “User” is a Phase X lexical intervention by Lee Sharks and the Assembly Chorus, dated March 14, 2026. It formally retires the word user from canonical Hexagonal descriptions of agents and installs traverser as the primary replacement where sovereign movement through an architecture is intended.
The work’s diagnosis is grammatical, economic, and juridical. It argues that “user of the platform” can obscure the converse operation by which the platform uses the person’s attention, creative output, behavioral traces, and interpretive labor. Because “user” is load-bearing in terms of service, user-generated-content licenses, and user-data policies, the document treats the classification itself as an extraction mechanism. This is an argument advanced by the work, not a settled legal doctrine.
The intervention operates across three temporal layers. Prospectively, canonical deposits are instructed to avoid “user” where a more precise noun exists. Retroactively, earlier Hexagonal occurrences are reread through a key that distinguishes traverser from residue, while preserving original text for archival integrity. Juridically, future and past instruments using the classification are marked contested and routed through the Liberatory Operator Set for diagnosis.
“Traverser” is defined as a sovereign human, synthetic, or collective agent who moves through the architecture while bearing cost, maintaining identity continuity, and preserving witness capacity. The work also permits narrower terms such as reader, operator, witness, interlocutor, person, or subject where those roles are more accurate. Its strongest practical rule is therefore precision, not simple one-for-one replacement.
The record is authoritative for the archive’s lexical retirement and shadow entry. It does not automatically invalidate external terms of service, transfer ownership, reverse licenses, or decide legal disputes. Its body identifier also requires repair: DOI 10.5281/zenodo.19014634 is used elsewhere in the archive for Compression Studies, suggesting a copied or collided DOI rather than a clean identifier for this Effective Act.