Stackelberg Move

The architect's first and only intervention: a single visible, irrevocable commitment made before the factory is switched on, in Schelling's sense of commitment and Stackelberg's of leading a game, which permanently places the factory in a reactive position and confers the identity it cannot derive from inside its own darkness. Having made it the architect leaves the operator's chair and becomes a strategic player, closer to Wiener's Manichean devil than to a designer. Its value is bounded: against no-swap-regret learners the architect can extract no more than the Stackelberg value V, while mean-based no-regret learners can reach the larger U*, giving the article's central equivalence — U* exceeds V exactly when the best configuration lies outside readable space — so the move must seed both a surplus-generating frontier and a surplus-retaining core. Everything in the Dark Stack is deployed in this one move.