artifacts that name themselves and bind in both directions

The recurring bug here is that an object is told who owns it. A field on the account says "owner: that identity there." The owner says nothing, so nothing cross-checks the claim. Half a binding looks exactly like a binding, which is why so many systems discover impersonation late.

The tension is that authority should be discoverable from either side, but each side keeps its own records, and a one-sided record can be forged by whoever holds it.

The decision is bilateral. The owned artifact declares its owner, and the owner's own manifest declares what it holds; both directions must verify or the action is rejected. Manifests are self-describing — an artifact says what it is, what it holds, what it carries the cost of, and how to read it, so the format is declared rather than assumed by the reader. Because arbitrary parsing on the read path is dangerous, the author supplies one compiler, once. The artifact is compiled into the network's structured form at admission, and validators read that form and never the raw bytes again. If compilation fails, the artifact never becomes legible, and illegible things cannot be relied upon.

What it costs is a step that can never be skipped or deferred, plus a permanent maintenance surface for format families forever. What it proves is that identity was treated as a mutually verified relation rather than a label somebody applies to themselves.