Structural capture names the characteristic way traversability degrades over time. Structure tends to serve itself: bureaucracies become self-preserving, institutions come to benefit from complexity, professionals from opaque pathways, organizations from participant lock-in, and regulators from accumulated procedure. None of this requires bad intent — it is drift, and it steadily converts a field that carries movement into one that obstructs it.
The model’s defense is a standing presumption, the structural equivalent of keeping metrics contestable:
Every barrier must periodically be able to explain what legitimate consequence justifies its continued existence. If no one can answer, remove it.
This forces accumulated friction to keep justifying itself against the consequences it claims to manage, rather than persisting simply because it already exists — a powerful anti-drift mechanism. It is aimed squarely at the deepest failure the function guards against: when the structure itself becomes the obstacle to legitimate movement, it has begun serving itself rather than the ecology. Its common instruments include weaponized delay and the accidental friction that friction proportionality exists to strip away. See Building and Defending It.