The distributed sensing layer is the non-sentimental reason interiority is ecologically necessary. A civilization cannot centrally observe most of what is going wrong inside it — that a job has become deadening, that a rule is producing fear, that a public story no longer matches lived reality, that something is off even while the metrics look excellent. Those readings live in participants’ interiors, and if the interior is allowed to hold them, develop them, and eventually turn them into signal, the ecology gains millions of independent error-detectors it has no other way to deploy.
The corollary is what makes it a design concern: a field that pressures interiors to conform before they can become articulate does not merely restrict feeling — it goes blind to its own condition, growing easier to coordinate precisely because less reality is permitted to interrupt the coordination. It is worked out in full, with the control-room analogy and the downstream damage to the other functions, in The Distributed Sensing Layer. Its companion failure is compliance mistaken for coherence.