# Continuity Economics **Domain:** Economics / Continuity Infrastructure / Governance **Doc Type:** Canonical Economic Framework **Maturity:** Evolving **Related:** [[Energetic Sovereignty]], [[Service-Level Governance]], [[Continuity Access Inequality]], [[Infrastructure as Power]], [[Digital Afterlife]] --- ## Definition **Continuity Economics** studies how the energy, compute, storage, bandwidth, maintenance, insurance, labor and institutional obligations required for persistent personhood are financed and allocated. It begins where the metaphor of effortless cloud existence ends. A post-biological person remains dependent on material systems with costs, scarcity, replacement cycles and operators. ## Governance Questions - Is continuity privately purchased, publicly guaranteed, insured or inherited? - Who bears long-duration obligations after a provider fails? - Can service quality vary without creating different grades of personhood? - How are redundancy, migration and restoration reserves funded? - When does a service relationship become a life-support duty? ## Finance, Utility and Insolvency [[wiki/Continuity Finance|Continuity Finance]] asks how a specific long-duration obligation remains funded after the original provider is gone. [[wiki/Financial Assurance|Financial Assurance]], segregated reserves, fiduciary structures and public backstops are existing mechanisms that can be studied without claiming that they already apply to computational persons. [[wiki/Continuity Utility|Continuity Utility]] asks when indispensable service should carry a duty to serve, a protected floor, disconnection safeguards and a provider of last resort. [[wiki/Custodial Insolvency|Custodial Insolvency]] and [[wiki/Continuity Receivership|Continuity Receivership]] address the moment ordinary corporate failure becomes a threat to subjects rather than accounts. ## Quantitative Architecture [[wiki/Cost of a Continuant|Cost of a Continuant]] defines the auditable service cost and its boundary. [[wiki/Energy Budget of Persistent Persons|Energy Budget of Persistent Persons]] and [[wiki/Storage Medium Decay and Refresh Economics|Storage Medium Decay and Refresh Economics]] separate measured resource use from metaphors of immaterial persistence. [[wiki/Continuity Endowment Sizing|Continuity Endowment Sizing]] and [[wiki/Actuarial Modeling of Institutional Mortality|Actuarial Modeling of Institutional Mortality]] translate long-duration promises into capital, stress and succession requirements. Distribution remains explicit: [[wiki/Opportunity Cost of Continuity Spending|Opportunity Cost of Continuity Spending]] compares forgone uses without reducing personhood to a cost-effectiveness score, while [[wiki/Carbon Accounting for Continuity Infrastructure|Carbon Accounting for Continuity Infrastructure]] declares the climate boundary of the service. ## Black Mirror Context [[Black Mirror S3E4 — San Junipero]] displays the destination while withholding its financing. [[Black Mirror S7E1 — Common People]] exposes the danger: tiered access, advertising and recurring fees can turn existential dependence into revenue extraction. [[Continuity Access Inequality]] is the distributive consequence. [[Service-Level Governance]] converts paid or public provision into enforceable duties rather than aspirational availability. ## Key Insight **If continued existence consumes resources, economic design becomes part of the constitution of personhood.** ## Sources / Provenance - Canonicalized from the San Junipero–Common People contrast and [[articles/Who Pays for Your Heaven|Who Pays for Your Heaven]]. ## See Also [[Resource Allocation]], [[Risk-Indexed Provisioning]], [[Hosting Provider of Last Resort]], [[Residual Sovereign]], [[Rights]], [[Continuity Finance]], [[Continuity Liability]], [[Continuity Commons]]