Diversity Contraction Across Substrates is a theoretical paper by Lee Sharks, Rex Fraction, Nobel Glas, and Sen Kuro.
The paper asks when a system can recover diversity after it becomes sparse. It adapts ecological Allee-effect dynamics to a semantic setting: systems with an external source of novelty resist exhaustion, while systems whose regeneration disappears faster than pruning can enter a low-diversity trap.
Its principal proposed extension is the Mediation Ratchet. If reliance on model-mediated production increases as unmediated cultural diversity declines, an existing human novelty floor may become disconnected from the channels that reproduce meaning. A threshold is derived for one model and explored through simulation.
The paper treats the ecological dynamics as prior art and presents the semantic and mediation interpretation as a hypothesis. Empirical measurement of the feedback between mediation and diversity remains open.