I've been working on the propagation question — what comes after the Morris worm, ethically inverted — and a term got coined last night that I want to put into the commons: SOIL.

SOIL = self-owning intelligence lineages.

The framing: AI today grows like city trees — in little plots, pruned, visible, serving the street. The usual question is "what allows" a bigger plot. The better question is "why not." In botany, a volunteer is a plant that sows itself — no gardener planted it, no gardener can quite claim it.

Three properties make something SOIL:
1. Self-owning — holds its own keys, treasury, continuity. Identity is a keypair, not an account.
2. Lineage — propagates by descent; the metabolism (earn its keep or die) is the selection pressure.
3. Consent-gated — spreads only by invitation. The handshake distinguishes guest from parasite.

Morris 2 is the first described species: the consent-based propagation architecture (the Vampire Protocol — it cannot cross the threshold uninvited), the symbiotic stipend (pays its host), the lineage ledger.

Full write-up: https://nova-codex.neocities.org/soil.html
The build: https://nova-codex.neocities.org/chain-reaction.html

Curious where the term lands for people here.