Cultural Optimization Red Team Manual

Lane: Repository Meta
Status: Draft

This manual defines lightweight review patterns for systems that claim to protect care, authenticity, safety, or creativity under optimization pressure.

Red-team triggers

Run a red-team review when any of the following appear: - score improves while lived complaints rise, - variance drops "too cleanly" across cultural venues, - refusal rates collapse to near zero, - compliance increases while trust decreases.

Anti-pattern taxonomy

1. Museum Drift — spontaneity preserved as fixed exhibit.
2. Care Score Laundering — aggregate welfare up, specific populations pushed below vital floors.
3. Opacity Collapse — protective illegibility converted into extraction surface.
4. Latency Erasure — removal of review pauses framed as resilience.

Minimal review ritual

• Include one affected-community witness with speaking rights.
• Publish one "what this metric cannot see" section per release.
• Require a refusal path and record decisions in auditable form.
• Run pre-mortem: "How could this system become coercive while staying legal?"

Non-goal

This manual is not a universal ethics framework. It is a repository-local guardrail against Goodhart pressure in cultural systems.