Claims / C-JV484N6KRW

ConjectureSuperseded

Capital aimed at an industry's attractor state is a catalyst and not a cause: it lowers the activation energy for a transition the economics already favour, and it cannot create a destination or invent demand. A market held by defensible rents is therefore a trapped state, stable for exactly as long as nothing supplies the energy to leave it.

Capital mechanisms

Evidence 0 passages

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Replaced by

An industry before its inflection is a supersaturated solution: every capability it needs is already dissolved in it, held in pieces by people who cannot assemble them, and it will sit that way indefinitely until something nucleates it. Capital aimed at the direction is the seed crystal. It supplies no material and no energy, only a template, and because the same solution crystallises differently around a different seed, whoever nucleates an industry selects which of its possible structures everyone afterwards lives inside. A market held by defensible rents is a solution nobody has seeded: metastable, not mysterious.

Why. The activation-energy version used diamond to graphite, which teaches permanence where the point is suddenness: the barrier is so high nothing ever clears it. Supersaturation carries three things the barrier framing could not. The material is already present and dispersed, which is what Part I argues about knowhow. Crystallisation is sudden once nucleated, which matches the punctuated pattern. And polymorphism makes the seed selective of structure and not only of timing, which is the path-dependence claim the book is named for. Founder ruled the supersession on 2026-10-20.

A superseded claim stays admitted: replacing is not deleting.