---
title: "Recursive Governance"
description: "Antikythera's label for a politics that After Alignment describes without naming."
type: "glossary-term"
canonical_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/terms/recursive-governance"
md_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/md/terms/recursive-governance"
last_updated: "2026-09-06"
site: "Antikythera Wiki"
---

# Recursive Governance

> A working definition written for this wiki from the reading notes; not Antikythera's own wording. From Antikythera Wiki (https://antikythera.wiki/terms/recursive-governance), an independent guide to Antikythera's published work.

Antikythera's label for a politics that After Alignment describes without naming. Bratton's recursive simulations, models that feed back on what they model (digital twins, toy worlds), are carried into politics through climate: supercomputing projections of 2050 have been made "sovereign actors," and action is taken now to prevent the future they imply. Against this he sets "regulatory solutionism," the EU fitting planetary dynamics into citizen-scale law about individual data, and a theory that planetary computation has outpaced. The term names the alternative: governance that owns the loop between simulation, regulation and the systems regulated instead of legislating for yesterday. Reflexive vs. Recursive Simulation supplies the mechanism; Corrective Loops the biospheric analogy. Sherman's chapter of The Planetary calls the fixation on governing AI an irony when AI could be a tool for governance, and Agentworld asks how multiagent simulations will end up "recursively impacting and governing" what they represent.

## Appears in

- [Agentworld (Research Brief)](https://antikythera.wiki/work/book/agentworld-brief) (2026-06-25)
- [For a General Theory of Simulations](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/theoryofsim) (2025-05-10)
- [After Alignment](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/afteralignment) (2025-05-10)
- [Speculative Philosophy of Planetary Computation](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/spoc) (2025-05-10)
- [Antikythera](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/research) (2025-05-10)
- [The Planetary](https://antikythera.wiki/work/book/the-planetary) (2024-11-10)

_Glossary generated 2026-09-06._