The Means of Production calls itself a research project. The word research is not decorative. It commits us to showing our work — naming our sources, stating our method, and meeting the strongest version of the argument against us rather than the weakest.
These eight standards are how we keep that promise. They are not aspirational. Each one names a concrete artifact that conforming projects must carry, and a place you can go to check it. Where a project has not yet met a standard, that gap is itself documented rather than hidden.
The reference implementation is The Hidden Ledger, which already carries footnotes, a notes apparatus, and citations to foundational literature. The flagship essays below have been brought up to the same standard; the rest of the catalog follows.
BIBLIOGRAPHIES FOR EVERY MAJOR PROJECT
Every major project ends with a bibliography: the works it draws on, in a consistent, checkable form. A reader should be able to leave the page and find what we read.
How we meet it: a Notes & Sources section closes each flagship essay, listing every cited work with author, title, publisher, and year.
EXPLICIT METHODOLOGICAL STATEMENTS
A project states what it is claiming, what counts as evidence for that claim, the procedure it follows, and the limits of what the method can show. No method is left implicit.
How we meet it: each flagship essay carries a Method section that names its analytic procedure and where it stops.
ENGAGEMENT WITH OPPOSING VIEWPOINTS
We state the strongest objection to our position — in a form its proponents would recognize — and answer it. A critique that only argues with a strawman has produced nothing.
How we meet it: each flagship essay carries a Counter-positions section citing a real, published dissent and our response.
CASE-STUDY DOCUMENTATION
Claims are demonstrated on worked examples, labelled as such. We distinguish constructed illustrations — built to show a mechanism — from descriptions of specific real events, and never blur the two.
How we meet it: worked examples are framed as case studies with an explicit note on whether each is illustrative or drawn from a documented event.
ARCHIVAL OR EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE
Where a project asserts something about the world, it points to evidence — a text, a record, a corpus, a documented pattern — rather than asking to be taken on rhetoric alone. We do not invent quotations or attribute fabricated statements to real actors.
How we meet it: empirical claims are tied to a citable source; illustrative constructions are marked as constructions.
CITATIONS TO FOUNDATIONAL LITERATURE
Our concepts have lineages. We cite the foundational scholarship a project descends from — really and accurately — so a reader can trace the idea upstream and judge what we have added.
How we meet it: superscript markers in the body link to numbered notes naming real, verifiable works.
VERSIONED RESEARCH NOTES
A project is a living document. Each one carries a version stamp — Research notes — vMAJOR.MINOR · YYYY-MM-DD — so revisions are legible and the state of the argument at any point is recoverable.
How we meet it: every conforming project shows its current version and date; the convention is documented for contributors in docs/RESEARCH-STANDARDS.md.
FORMAL ESSAYS OR WORKING PAPERS
Beneath the interactive tools and indexes sits writing that can stand on its own: sustained, structured argument that carries the apparatus above. These are catalogued as working papers.
How we meet it: the register below tracks the formal essays and their conformance status.
The formal essays that carry the full apparatus. Each link opens the paper; the status marks how completely it currently meets the eight standards.