Compression Studies: What Survives, What Burns, and Who Decides — The Founding Document of a Discipline (EA-CS-FOUND-01)

Compression Studies is a discipline statement by Lee Sharks that proposes a general field for studying the formal and ethical structure of compression across cultural, computational, pedagogical, political, and archival domains. Its founding question is not whether compression occurs—transmission always requires it—but what survives, what burns, and who bears the cost.

The paper’s central taxonomy is the Three Compressions. Lossy compression produces low-density, high-throughput residue from ambient material. Predatory compression produces dense and effective forms by drawing upon shared semantic capital while externalizing the cost. Witness compression produces dense forms from the creator’s own bearing-cost and makes the result available to the commons. The regimes are distinguished principally by fuel source and ledger rather than by elegance, density, or fidelity alone.

The document formalizes the field through variables such as semantic density, back-projection yield, hijackability, propagation, fuel material, bearing-cost, and net effect on the commons. It supplies a five-step classification method and identifies applications ranging from lyric poetry and propaganda to coinage, AI training, model collapse, and classroom practice. It also differentiates the proposed discipline from information theory, technical data compression, literary criticism, media archaeology, and medical uses of the phrase “compression studies.” The accompanying journal issue and Assembly ratification record constitute its declared founding corpus.