How it was built. 
What would break it.

The initial hypothesis was run against four historical cases chosen to stress it: the Printing Press, the Steam Engine, the Spreadsheet, and Social Media. These were not chosen because they obviously supported the hypothesis. They were chosen because they represented different types of technological disruption across different centuries, economic contexts, and cultural environments.

After Draft 1, two independent adversarial reviews were conducted. The instruction to reviewers was explicit: assume the framework is wrong. Find where it fails. Do not evaluate it as something to be improved. Evaluate it as something to be broken. Every charge was logged in a formal criticism register and assessed honestly rather than defensively.

Each draft was frozen before the next was written. This means criticisms are assessed against what was actually written, not against a revised draft that incorporates the criticism retroactively. The alternative, continuous revision without fixed drafts, produces frameworks that are always moving targets. Critics cannot pin down what they are criticizing because the author keeps updating. That is intellectually evasive even when unintentional.

No modification was accepted into a new draft unless supported by repeated evidence from independent sources. A single case study suggesting a refinement was logged as a candidate for future testing, not incorporated immediately. A mechanism that appeared in two or three independent cases was considered for inclusion. A mechanism that appeared in only one case remained in future research. An intelligent argument for changing the framework was not sufficient reason to change it. A pattern of evidence across independent sources was.

The original hypothesis described a phenomenon in economic terms. The first pivot recognized that economics was the wrong primary lens. Value does not migrate because markets reorganize. Markets reorganize because humans adapt. The economic migration is the observable result of something more fundamental: the human response to losing a source of meaningful differentiation. This pivot changed the framework’s core statement from a description of economic behaviour to a framework of human adaptation. Technology is the perturbation. The environment is the medium. Adaptation is the mechanism. Differentiation is the engine. That sequence did not exist in the original hypothesis. It emerged from the pivot.

The framework’s early versions described adaptation without adequately explaining what humans are adapting toward. The implicit answer was: scarcity. Humans chase what is scarce. The second pivot identified this as wrong. Scarcity is a condition, not a driver. Humans do not chase scarcity. They chase meaningful difference — recognition, standing, identity, the characteristics that distinguish them in ways others recognize as significant. This distinction explains why mechanical watches became more valuable when quartz made accurate timekeeping abundant. Quartz made the accuracy abundant and left the rest exposed. Without this pivot, the survival of mechanical watches looks like an anomaly. With it, it looks like a confirmation. This pivot also produced the formal definition of meaningful differentiation that resolved the tautology charge.

An early draft placed power reorganization at its centre. The third pivot corrected this. Power reorganization is a consequence of value migration, not its driver or its core. Power follows the new differentiator. It does not create it. This pivot prevented the framework from becoming a theory of power, which would have been both less accurate and less useful. The framework describes the migration. It does not yet fully explain who captures it. That gap is acknowledged rather than papered over and is the primary focus of the next testing phase.

Evolution does not reward difference. It rewards fitness. Difference is the consequence of fitness, not its cause. If the same logic applies to the Migration of Value, then the framework is not describing a drive toward distinction. It is describing adaptive fitness expressing itself as recognizable difference within a given environment. Those are not the same claim. The answer determines whether this is fundamentally a theory of human psychology or a theory of adaptive systems.

When technology removes the functional layer from a valued object or practice, what emerges? Is the remaining value newly created by the disruption, or was it always present, hidden beneath functional necessity? If technology removes the noise created by abundance, and what emerges is something humans always cared about, then the framework is not describing economic migration. It is describing what becomes visible when everything inessential is stripped away. That distinction may ultimately determine whether this is a framework about markets or a framework about the nature of human meaning.

Three historical cases have produced consistent evidence that migration outcomes are substantially determined by organisational resources, political access, and institutional capacity — not by differentiation logic alone. The framework describes the mechanism of migration accurately. It does not yet provide an adequate account of why specific parties capture specific migrations. That gap is the primary focus of the next round of testing.