How to read the Radiant
The key, not the essay.
Six short blocks: what the colours mean, what a card is, how to tell surveyed fact from extrapolation, what a tension is, and who is speaking when the chart starts to talk.
01
The three eras
Modernity (MM, ~1200–2150), Divergence (DM, ~1650–2400), and Liveness (LM, ~2000–2300, speculative) are three overlapping operational logics, not sequential ages. In 2026 all three are simultaneously active. Each era owns a hue family — the same three hues everywhere on this site and in the Atlas.
02
Dawn, Day, Dusk — phase is brightness
Each era runs its own Dawn → Day → Dusk lifecycle, independent of the others. On this chart, phase is not a separate colour — it is luminance within the era's hue. A machine brightens as it ignites and dims as it decays. No legend key is needed once you know this: phase is legible as light.
03
What a Machine Card is
A card describes a class, not an instance — "the joint-stock company,"
not "the VOC." Each carries a phase-snapshot trajectory, typed state variables, and
couplings to other machines, with every field flagged CANON or
EXTRAP depending on how it was sourced.
Amsterdam Bourse (1602)
04
Solid vs. dashed
Real charts distinguish surveyed coastline from reported-but-unsurveyed. This chart does
the same: CANON renders solid, EXTRAP renders dashed at
reduced opacity. This is the single most important thing to know before trusting
anything on the LM lane — most of it is unsurveyed coastline, genuinely
speculative, marked as such rather than smoothed over.
05
Tensions
A tension is a named pressure between two machines, moving through four phases as it builds: latent, loading, rupturing, resolved. Rupturing is the only hot colour on the entire map — reserved for exactly this, so it reads as urgent when it appears.
06
Who is speaking
Prime Radiant is a trunk — a deterministic, citable model of the card corpus — with interchangeable heads that read from it: a query head that explains, a prediction head that forecasts within tolerances, a prophecy head, a story head. Typography marks the seam: serif is a head talking, mono is the trunk citing its sources underneath.
Voice · a head speaking
"The Bourse did not merely trade shares — it manufactured the idea that a claim on a venture could itself be sold."
Readout · the trunk citing
machine:amsterdam-bourse-1602 · opp_strength 0.88 (1602–1688) · CANON
The trunk is a model, not a prophecy; the heads may prophesy, and they always name their sources.