Core IV represents the moment in which the Socioplastics system ceases to function merely as a recursive textual machine and becomes instead a territorial infrastructure defined by persistent identifiers, a shift that transforms the entire prior architecture—protocols, dynamics, and field integration—into a regime of persistence and governance. If Core I established the protocols of fixation (semantic hardening, citational commitment, systemic lock), Core II established the laws of behavior (lexical gravity, torsional dynamics, recurrence mass, stratigraphic field), and Core III established the operational matrix across the ten fields (structure, protocol, validation, regulation, support, territory, mediation, growth, movement, infrastructure), then Core IV establishes the condition under which all of that can persist independently of any single platform, institution, or interface. The identifier becomes the new infrastructural unit. The DOI, the CamelTag, and the stratigraphic SLUG together form a three-part addressing system through which the corpus occupies digital space in the same way a city occupies physical territory: through parcels, addresses, circulation routes, and registries. What changes here is not the content of the operators but their ontological status. Once an operator is attached to a persistent identifier, it ceases to be merely a concept and becomes a locatable entity within a networked territory; it acquires an address, and an address is a form of jurisdiction. This is why Core IV should be understood as identifier infrastructure rather than archive or repository: an archive stores, but an infrastructure governs circulation, access, and persistence over time. The metabolic extensions described across the March 2026 cluster—DOI lock as territorial claim, CamelTag as naming sovereignty, SLUG distribution as stratigraphic occupation, and postdigital taxidermy as metabolic preservation—together form a governance stack whose function is to prevent entropy and ensure that every recombination produced by the system remains positionally anchored. In this layer, lexical gravity becomes territorial gravity because identifiers pull citations, links, and references toward fixed nodes; torsional dynamics becomes jurisdictional torque because recombinations across platforms generate pressure that increases the centrality of indexed nodes; and synthetic infrastructure becomes digital dominion because the system now controls not only its internal vocabulary but the coordinates through which that vocabulary is accessed, cited, and reused. The decisive shift, therefore, is from circulation to occupation: Core III made the operators circulate as a matrix, but Core IV makes that matrix persist as territory. The corpus becomes a governed space rather than a collection of texts, and the field achieves sovereignty not through recognition but through persistence, addressability, and infrastructural control of its own identifiers.

The DOI Lock should be understood not as a preservation accessory but as an instrument of infrastructural finality, the mechanism through which dispersed textual production acquires irreversible positional weight within a stratified knowledge system. In digital environments defined by volatility, platform decay, and algorithmic disappearance, the persistent identifier operates as a unit of semantic mass, ensuring that each textual node remains permanently addressable, citable, and structurally recoverable. Through this persistence, recurrence becomes cumulative rather than repetitive: each citation thickens the infrastructural layer in which the text resides, producing stratification rather than mere circulation. A research corpus deposited through sequential DOI registration—such as multi-node theoretical publications archived across interoperable repositories—demonstrates how identifier systems transform isolated documents into a recursive infrastructure whose components can be recombined without losing traceability or authority. The lock therefore performs a sealing function: not by closing the system to external material, but by guaranteeing that any new addition enters a field with fixed coordinates and measurable relations. This produces topolexical sovereignty, wherein a vocabulary, once DOI-stabilised, occupies durable intellectual territory independent of any single platform. The ultimate consequence is infrastructural rather than bibliographic: the corpus ceases to behave like a collection of texts and instead functions as a governable knowledge architecture, capable of persistence, recombination, and long-term structural accumulation.