The Canon of Research Review
The formal documents beneath the poetry — the path privacymage walked to write the 31
acts, gathered into one bibliography.
The First Person Spellbook compresses real research. This file is the canon of that
research: the primary corpus (privacymage's own papers — the Privacy is Value book,
the agentprivacy model whitepapers, the research notes in agentprivacy-docs), the
formal root per act, and the external standards and literature the work stands on.
Three layers, three depths of rehydration:
Poem → Proverb → Act (the spellbook) →
the primary corpus (privacymage's papers and research notes) →
the external canon (the standards, papers, and books the corpus itself cites).
Items marked (agentprivacy-docs) are privacymage's own research notes — the deeper
layer he made. They are internal (not all public); their public home is
agentprivacy.ai, and the facilitator can share specific notes on request.
This is a non-exhaustive list. It gathers the load-bearing roots, not every source.
Each act stands on more than is named here, and the corpus keeps growing — treat this as
a starting thread to pull, not a closed bibliography.
1. The primary corpus — Privacy is Value (privacymage's own work)
The canon papers are one book, Privacy is Value, in versioned volumes (naming
convention, First Person, 2026-06-10). The spine the whole spellbook leans on:
| Document | What it is | Where |
|---|---|---|
| The agentprivacy model whitepaper — Privacy is Value · V6: The Whitepaper | the main whitepaper: the model's technical architecture — Swordsman and Mage derived from the First Person (body v6.3) | agentprivacy.ai/model · papers/whitepapers/swordsman_mage_whitepaper_v6_3.md (agentprivacy-docs) |
| Privacy is Value · V6: The Gathering Turn and the Moving Ceiling | the model's formal specification & current authority — the full model, R(t)/t*, preconditions, C1–C89, references | agentprivacy.ai/model · papers/v6/privacy_value_v6_formal_specification.md |
| The First Person Project White Paper v1.1 | the network's public companion: the First Person Network — "a global digital utility that enables trusted connections…" (not a social network, not centralized, not company-owned) | https://www.firstperson.network/ · /white-paper |
| Privacy is Value · V6 — Swordsman / Mage / Research-Paper / Crosswalk readings | the compressed, companion, research, and bridge editions of V6 | papers/v6/… |
| Privacy is Value · V5.4: The Amnesia Protocol | the predecessor volume — the static equation, the algebraic foundation, §10.2 (betweenness of the Gap), §14.5 (Selene's Proof) | papers/v5/privacy_value_v5_4_formal_specification.md |
| Understanding-as-Key (the Zypher paper) | comprehension as a key primitive (Act 29's ceremony) | papers/lineage/understanding_as_key_zypher_paper_v1.md |
| The research proposal / collaboration invitation | the standing invitation (v2.2) | papers/lineage/research_proposal_v2_0.md |
| Mage & Swordsman Extension Whitepapers | the two browser-extension product papers (Act 28) | papers/whitepapers/MAGE_EXTENSION_WHITEPAPER.md · SWORDSMAN_EXTENSION_WHITEPAPER.md |
| The Conjecture Register (C1–C89) | the single conjecture-numbering authority | research/CONJECTURE_REGISTER_V6.md |
| The research-note series | the dated notes where V6 grew (Lorenz ceiling, EML, ARCH-1, Aletheia-and-Lethe, V5.1–V5.3, …) | research/… (agentprivacy-docs) |
| Reference shelf | Glossary Master v4.0 · Promise Theory Reference v1.4 · IEEE 7012 Quick Reference (MyTerms) · UOR × Tetrahedra × ZK Mapping v2.2 · Visual Architecture Guide v2.0 · Systems Hexagram Physics | reference/… |
| Grimoires | Spellbook v5.0 canonical · Zero-Knowledge Grimoire v3.0 · Parallel Society v1.0 · Plurality v1.1 | grimoires/… |
| The living model | privacymage grimoire v10.4.0 (today's root) · the V6 model JSONs (dark/light) | models/… |
2. The formal root per act (confirmed ★)
Each act's primary formal reference. (Quick roots + links also in Canon Sources.)
| # | Act | Formal root |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Venice, 1494 | Pacioli, Summa de Arithmetica (Venice, 1494), tract Particularis de Computis et Scripturis |
| 2 | The Dual Ceremony | Ellison, Ceremony Design and Analysis (IACR ePrint 2007/399) · + the agentprivacy model whitepaper |
| 3 | The Drake's Teaching | Allen, The Path to Self-Sovereign Identity (2016) · + Privacy is Value V6 formal spec |
| 4 | The Blade Alone | IEEE P7012 Machine Readable Personal Privacy Terms (MyTerms) |
| 5 | Light Armor | Allen, Progressive Trust (Blockchain Commons, 2022) |
| 6 | Trust Graph Plane | ToIP Foundation, Trust over IP Technology Architecture Spec v1.0 (2021) · Brandes (2001) |
| 7 | The Anti-Mirror | Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019) |
| 8 | The Ancient Rule | Saltzer & Schroeder, The Protection of Information in Computer Systems (1975) · Shamir, How to Share a Secret (1979) |
| 9 | Zcash Shield | Ben-Sasson et al., Zerocash (IEEE S&P 2014) · BGIN ZKP Study Report (see §4) |
| 10 | Topology of Revelation | Tishby, Pereira & Bialek, The Information Bottleneck Method (1999) |
| 11 | Balanced Spiral / φ | Privacy is Value V5.4 §14.5 Selene's Proof (agentprivacy-docs) |
| 12 | The Forgetting | Villers, Damien (2016), Proverbiogenesis: the phases of proverbial birth (9th Interdisciplinary Colloquium on Proverbs, Tavira, pp. 369–380; HAL hal-01698106) · Mieder, Proverbs: A Handbook (2004) · cf. Villers & Mieder (2017), Proverbium 34 |
| 13 | Book of Promises | Bergstra & Burgess, Promise Theory: Principles and Applications (2014) · Promise Theory Reference v1.4 |
| 14 | The Claimed String | Benet, IPFS — Content-Addressed, Versioned, P2P File System (2014) |
| 15 | Running in Shackles | Shannon, A Mathematical Theory of Communication (1948) · Kolmogorov (1965) |
| 16 | When Pools Become Wells | Barabási & Albert, Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks (1999) |
| 17 | Bonfire in the Dark Forest | Liu Cixin, The Dark Forest (2008) · Robinson & Konstantopoulos, Ethereum is a Dark Forest (2020) |
| 18 | A Mirror in Dust | privacymage Mage-Mode / 7th-Capital note (agentprivacy-docs) · Pariser, The Filter Bubble (2011) |
| 19 | The Anthropic Archivist | Bai et al. (Anthropic), Constitutional AI (2022) |
| 20 | The Infinite Vault | Covenant of Humanistic Technologies (agentprivacy-docs) · UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) |
| 21 | The Hitchhiker's Gambit | Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979) · Gemmell, the Skilgannon novels (2003) |
| 22 | Hoopy Frood | Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979) · Benet, IPFS (2014) |
| 23 | The Manifold Dragon | UOR Foundation, PRISM / Universal Object Reference · the I Ching (Wilhelm/Baynes) · Privacy is Value V4 (the PVM equation) |
| 24 | The Holographic Bound | Susskind, The World as a Hologram (1995) · Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine (1967, holons) · the BRAID paper |
| 25 | The Dragon's Hide | Donenfeld, WireGuard: Next Generation Kernel Network Tunnel (NDSS 2017) |
| 26 | The Master and His Emissary | McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (2009) · The Matter with Things (2021) |
| 27 | Forging ZK Blades | Groth, On the Size of Pairing-Based NIZK Arguments (Groth16, 2016) · Blockchain Commons Open Integrity Project · BGIN ZKP Study Report (§4) · ZK Grimoire v3.0 |
| 28 | Celestial Ceremony Engine | Cheng Lou, pretext (@chenglou/pretext) · the Extension Whitepapers |
| 29 | The Dragon Wakes | Google Quantum AI, secp256k1 quantum resource-estimate whitepaper (Babbush, Gidney, Drake, Boneh, 2026) · Shor (1994) · NIST FIPS 203/204 (2024) · the Zypher paper |
| 30 | The Dihedral Mirror | UOR Foundation, Atlas of Resonance Classes / PRISM · UOR × Tetrahedra × ZK Mapping v2.2 |
| 31 | The First Delegation | Branco, Machado & Raymond (2025), Icarus 441, 116724 · Canup & Asphaug (2001), Nature |
3. External canon — the standards, papers & books
Standards & specifications
- IEEE P7012 — Machine Readable Personal Privacy Terms (MyTerms). (Acts 4, 28)
- Trust over IP Foundation — ToIP Technology Architecture Specification v1.0 (2021), trustoverip.org. (Act 6)
- W3C — Verifiable Credentials Data Model. (Act 2)
- NIST — FIPS 203 (ML-KEM) · FIPS 204 (ML-DSA), 2024. (Act 29)
- Zcash — Protocol Specification; WireGuard — wireguard.com. (Acts 9, 25)
Foundational papers
- Shannon (1948), A Mathematical Theory of Communication. (Act 15)
- Kolmogorov (1965), Three Approaches to the Quantitative Definition of Information. (Act 15)
- Brandes (2001), A Faster Algorithm for Betweenness Centrality. (Act 6)
- Tishby, Pereira & Bialek (1999), The Information Bottleneck Method. (Act 10)
- Saltzer & Schroeder (1975), The Protection of Information in Computer Systems. (Act 8)
- Shamir (1979), How to Share a Secret. (Act 8)
- Ben-Sasson et al. (2014), Zerocash. (Act 9)
- Groth (2016), On the Size of Pairing-Based Non-Interactive Arguments (Groth16). (Act 27)
- Shor (1994), Algorithms for Quantum Computation: Discrete Logarithms and Factoring. (Act 29)
- Google Quantum AI (2026), secp256k1 quantum resource-estimate whitepaper. (Act 29)
- Benet (2014), IPFS. (Acts 14, 22)
- Barabási & Albert (1999), Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks. (Act 16)
- 't Hooft (1993) / Susskind (1995), the holographic principle. (Act 24)
- Bergstra & Burgess (2014), Promise Theory: Principles and Applications. (Act 13)
- Bai et al. / Anthropic (2022), Constitutional AI. (Act 19)
- Branco, Machado & Raymond (2025), Icarus 441, 116724 · Canup & Asphaug (2001), Nature. (Act 31)
- Robinson & Konstantopoulos (2020), Ethereum is a Dark Forest. (Act 17)
Books & literature
- Pacioli (1494), Summa de Arithmetica. (Act 1)
- Zuboff (2019), The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. (Act 7)
- Villers, Damien (2016), Proverbiogenesis: the phases of proverbial birth (HAL hal-01698106) · Mieder (2004), Proverbs: A Handbook · Villers & Mieder (2017), Proverbium 34. (Act 12)
- Liu Cixin (2008), The Dark Forest. (Act 17)
- Pariser (2011), The Filter Bubble. (Act 18)
- Koestler (1967), The Ghost in the Machine. (Act 24)
- McGilchrist (2009), The Master and His Emissary · (2021) The Matter with Things. (Act 26)
- Adams (1979), The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. (Acts 21, 22)
- Gemmell, the Skilgannon novels (White Wolf, 2003). (Act 21)
- UN (1948), Universal Declaration of Human Rights. (Act 20)
Kindred substrate (attribute to its makers)
- UOR Foundation — Universal Object Reference, PRISM, the Atlas of Resonance Classes (github.com/UOR-Foundation). (Acts 23, 27, 30)
- Blockchain Commons / Christopher Allen — Open Integrity Project, Progressive Trust, SSI (github.com/BlockchainCommons). (Acts 5, 27)
- Cheng Lou —
@chenglou/pretext. (Act 28) - Anthropic — Claude, Constitutional AI. (Act 19)
- the BRAID authors; the holonic architecture authors. (Act 24)
4. Contributed / edited external work
- BGIN — Standardization Report SR-011, Zero-Knowledge Proof Study (v2)
(Blockchain Governance Initiative Network), which privacymage edited / contributed
to. Published among BGIN's working-group reports at
https://bgin-global.org/publications. Most relevant to Act 9 (Zcash Shield) and
Act 27 (Forging ZK Blades), and the root of the Zero sibling spellbook (§5). BGIN
also appears in the City as a kindred-coalition at City Hall.
5. The five spellbooks (sibling books — context, not primary)
The First Person Spellbook (the Story book) is one of five sibling spellbooks in the
privacymage universe. The other four are context only — they are not the subject of
this workshop, and they are not broken down by act here; each is named by its theme and
its root. (The five-spellbook affinity is recorded in the grimoire, Act 18.)
| Spellbook | Sigil | About | Root references |
|---|---|---|---|
| Story (the First Person Spellbook) | 🗡️🧙 |
the Seeker's narrative journey — today's focus / the only primary book | the Privacy is Value corpus (§1) · the 31 acts (§2) |
| Zero | 🔐 |
tales of nothingness and origin; ZKP mathematics | BGIN SR-011 Zero-Knowledge Proof Study (v2) (§4) + other ZKP research (Goldwasser–Micali–Rackoff, The Knowledge Complexity of Interactive Proof Systems, 1985; Groth16; Zerocash) · Zero-Knowledge Grimoire v3.0 (agentprivacy-docs) |
| Canon | 📜 |
core philosophical chapters; a high-level history of blockchain | Nakamoto, Bitcoin (2008) · Buterin, Ethereum Whitepaper (2013) · a high-level history-of-blockchain canon |
| Parallel | 🏰 |
alternative paths; exit as a fundamental right — Farewell to Westphalia | Jarrad Hope & Peter Ludlow, Farewell to Westphalia (Logos) — what succeeds the nation-state, logos.co/farewell-to-westphalia · the Peace of Westphalia (1648) as the order left behind · Parallel Society Grimoire v1.0 (agentprivacy-docs) |
| Plurality | ⿻ |
coordination without collapse — Plurality | Weyl, Tang et al., Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy (2024) · Plurality Grimoire v1.1 (agentprivacy-docs) |
These four are linked so a mouse's agent can follow a thread sideways into a sibling book
— but a mouse builds only off the Story book today.
6. How a mouse uses this canon
You do not read all of this to write your proverbs. You cite it afterward, so the
thread runs as deep as a reader wants: from your poem, to the act, to privacymage's paper,
to the external work it stands on. When a proverb of yours leans on one of these, record
the act number (canon_act) — and, if it reaches a named document here, the document — in
your personal-patch JSON. That is rehydration with provenance.
Attribution holds at every layer. The Privacy is Value corpus is privacymage's;
the kindred substrate (UOR, Blockchain Commons, pretext, Anthropic, BRAID) belongs to
its makers; the external canon to its authors. The spellbook's contribution is the
method layer that weaves them into one story.
(⚔️⊥⿻⊥🧙)😊
———
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