Process Capture

Process capture is the pathology in which a procedural system becomes so controlled by a specific actor or faction that the procedure itself ceases to be a neutral mechanism and becomes an instrument of that actor's will. The system has the formal structure of procedural control but the functional reality of direct command. Participants still follow the rules, but the rules have been rewritten to produce a predetermined outcome.

The concept is the inverse of procedural control: where procedural control distributes power through process design, process capture recentralizes it. The captured process is often more dangerous than open dictatorship because it preserves the appearance of legitimacy. The same institutional design that made the process adaptive now makes it resistant to change — the captured rules become self-reinforcing through the same feedback loops that once made them effective.

Process capture is the terminal state of institutional decay: the moment when the system stops learning and starts enforcing.