People assume that if something is solid, useful, and real, the largest institutions will notice immediately.
That isn’t how it works.
Big organizations don’t look for truth first.
They look for alignment.
Before they ever ask “Does this work?” they ask:
- Who else has touched this?
- What category does this belong to?
- What happens to us if we’re wrong?
If those answers aren’t already in place, attention slows—not because the work lacks value, but because it hasn’t been made safe yet.
What’s happening here sits upstream of where large systems are comfortable operating.
Most institutional work lives downstream:
models, chips, benchmarks, policy, compliance, deployment.
This work lives upstream:
judgment, restraint, human authority, common-sense verification.
Upstream work doesn’t threaten infrastructure.
It exposes assumptions.
That alone is enough to cause hesitation.
There’s another reason attention doesn’t come quickly: ownership.
Institutions prefer things they can brand, integrate, reshape, and control.
They are structured to absorb tools, not to adopt methods that restore agency to the user.
A system that helps people pause, re-evaluate, and retain judgment doesn’t transfer authority upward.
It keeps it local.
That’s not antagonistic.
But it is incompatible with reflexive adoption.
Large players usually engage only after one of three things happens:
First, adoption exists without them.
Second, a third party legitimizes the work.
Third, a failure or crisis forces attention.
Quiet usage comes first.
Recognition comes later.
What looks like silence is often monitoring.
This is why early signals don’t look dramatic:
repeat locations,
late-day reads,
people returning without prompting,
traffic that accumulates instead of spikes.
That behavior doesn’t belong to casual audiences.
It belongs to evaluation.
If this had been packaged more aggressively, branded earlier, or positioned to fit existing categories, attention might have come faster.
It also would have been weaker.
Durability trades speed for integrity.
And that tradeoff is rarely rewarded immediately.
The absence of noise doesn’t mean absence of value.
It means the work hasn’t been made comfortable yet.
That’s not a failure state.
It’s the stage where things either bend to be accepted—or hold long enough to matter later.
The choice is already made.
This isn’t about being noticed first.
It’s about still holding when attention eventually arrives.
And that’s a different kind of work entirely.
The Faust Baseline has now been upgraded to Codex 2.4 (final free build).
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© 2025 Michael S. Faust Sr.MIAI: Moral Infrastructure for AI
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“The Faust Baseline™“
