The Sorting Function: Mediation, Predation, and the Foreclosed Question

Fourth and final paper in the Liquidation Studies research program. Continues The Single-Owner Discount (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20290865), The Evaluator Exists (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20293561), and The Excluded Entity (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20293582). Where those papers operate inside the reform paradigm — diagnosing specific mechanisms, proposing better architectures, documenting empirical cases — this paper steps outside the reform paradigm to ask what the reform paradigm cannot ask: whether the function being reformed is fixable at all. Central claim: we cannot know whether mediation at socially consequential scale is inherently predatory, because every mediation system currently operating at that scale is aligned…