Prices, scores, votes, rankings, maps, and summaries can coordinate attention and action by compressing distributed information, but compression can discard decision-relevant context.

A compressed signal reduces many observations or judgments to a form that bounded participants can compare and act upon. That reduction can lower coordination cost, reveal system-level patterns, and direct scarce attention without requiring every participant to inspect every underlying fact. Its usefulness depends on the signal's construction, objective, eligible inputs, update process, and fit to the decision. The same transformation necessarily leaves detail outside the representation, and the omitted information may include scope, uncertainty, minority reasons, externalities, or local conditions. This does not mean compression should be abandoned or that every fact must remain permanently in context. It means no compressed output should be treated as self-explanatory truth. LivingIP should therefore preserve provenance, definitions, reasons, and underlying objects so an agent or reviewer can inspect what a score, map, assessment, or market signal represents and omits.