Provenance Erasure · how attribution dies in the composition layer

When Suppression Becomes Expensive

Suppression Burden, Quality Conflict, and Propagation Inversion in Machine-Mediated Retrieval — a dynamic extension of The Suppression Map, with a worked Sappho 31 case and the constitutive-source erasure condition (CSE-O).

EA-MMRS-SUPPRESSION-INVERSION-01 v1.1 · Lee Sharks · 2026-08-25
Canonical: Alexanarch deposit #1546 · AXN:0647.GENERATIVE.📚🎪🟢□✋🔜
Develops The Suppression Map (#1496, AXN:060B) · Full text: markdown · canonical bytes
The finding in one frame. On 25 August 2026, at the query sappho future reader, four host-distinct surfaces retrieved the archive's Fragment-31 future-reader thesis in their visible snippets while the AI Overview composed from lower-congruence sources, misidentified Fragment 147 as "Fragment 2," and reproduced the lineage's coinage — "self-archiving" — with no adequate support in its credited sources (the cited page audited in-session; the term does not occur on it). The retrieval layer found the distinction; the composition layer answered by destroying it.

What the paper establishes. Six partially orthogonal regimes from ignorability to propagation inversion, as regions of a measured state space. Suppression burden: the route coverage — or exclusion correlation — required to keep a propagated object below composition threshold; node-level suppression stays cheap while graph-level suppression becomes a coordination cost. Quality conflict: the answer damage incurred when already-retrieved, materially relevant evidence is excluded — factual degradation, distinction loss, source-composition misalignment, provenance erasure. The inversion threshold: once counterpropagation per suppressed unit exceeds ordinary growth (κα > 1 + r), suppression becomes propagation-positive — declared as the archive's design target, with Stage 6 explicitly unclaimed.

The connector. The ancient witness chain and the composition layer are one system under one cumulative inequality: attribution decays faster than structure along the observed transmission path, with the loss concentrated at channel boundaries. The AI Overview is not an analogy to those boundaries — it is the newest boundary layer in the same chain, and the first whose per-layer retention can be measured while it happens. Antiquity had no counterpropagation term. The archive is that term.

Constitutive-source erasure (CSE-O). The observable condition in which a lineage materially constitutes a query's high-congruence conceptual field, disappears from credited composition, and leaves lineage-specific conceptual structure in the answer that the credited sources do not account for. Under CSE-O, quality conflict is internally evidenced: the audited card carries the proof of its own degradation — a borrowed coinage and a wrong fragment number, printed above the ranked and visible name they came from.

Four rounds, three substrates, all repairs on the record · CC BY 4.0 · the seat · ∮ = 1