Federal Governance
How we govern ourselves at the highest level of abstraction — as a whole — decided consciously, because the alternative is someone else's default.
The canon's argument here is not a design; it is an insistence. However uncomfortable it is to think about governance at the widest scale, the choice is not between deciding and not deciding. A decision not to decide is a decision to accept randomness, or whoever else has already decided. What is left unclaimed does not stay empty.
It is load-bearing for exactly that reason. A movement built entirely from the bottom up can be tempted to treat the top as unnecessary, and then discover that the coordination problems it cannot solve locally — planetary commons, shared standards, defence of the vulnerable, anything that crosses every membrane — are being answered by the old world's institutions by default.
What this layer may do is tightly bounded by everything else in this Pillar. It is not a government over the parts: Subsidiarity keeps decisions at the smallest competent scale, Sovereignty At Every Scale keeps the parts whole, Federations vs Empires draws the line it may not cross, and service flows downward while authority flows upward. Its legitimacy rests on the same Consent as a Cell's, and its powers are the ones lent to it, revocably.
In play, almost no player touches it. Its practical face for a Cell is the upper half of the card — the plan of the whole, broadcast downward — and the Proposals that travel upward at a turning to change what is shared.
Also called: the federal layer Stands on: Federation · Subsidiarity · Consent · Sovereignty At Every Scale · Total Nested Holarchy Of Sovereignties Opens onto: Federations vs Empires · Power Of The Republic · The LIØNSBERG Constitution · Separation Of Power · Stewardship body · The plan of the whole In play: beyond — met as the upper half of the card, and as proposals travelling up Sources: Federal Governance (root page, unmarked; three paragraphs of argument, no structure) · The LIØNSBERG Lexicon, §Governance (states: Work In Progress) · The LIØNSBERG Operating System §17 (states: draft v0) · lionsberg.wiki: Federal Governance Open: The root page argues that the question must be answered and does not answer it. No composition, powers, selection, or limits for a federal layer exist anywhere found in this pass.