Relationships

Every meme is shaped by three orthogonal things: a hard prerequisite gate, a soft weighted signal (affinity / disaffinity / conflict), and a size. They never overlap — hard logic, soft pull, scale.

The hard gate: prerequisites

A prerequisite is a boolean expression that must evaluate true. It is the directed backbone of the tree. Combinators nest arbitrarily:

all — AND (every child)
any — OR (one or more)
none — NOT (none of these held) — a hard exclusion, the engine of path dependence
nOf: { min, max, of } — count; min:1,max:1 is “exactly one of”, and so on

Leaves are typed, so prerequisites are also the join from the meme graph into the other trees. A bare string is a meme; everything else is prefixed:

Leaf	True when…
`metal` (bare) / `meme:`	the actor holds the meme
`material:`	the commodity is in reach
`construction:`	the workstation/building is available
`faction:` / `institution:` / `business:`	an instance exists in scope (forward-ref to the governance tree)
`event:`	the event has occurred / is active (forward-ref to the timeline)

A leaf’s kind also sets which gate it feeds by default — meme: gates learning, material:/construction: gate doing, and material reach gates ex-nihilo discovery — so a material requirement blocks performing a praxis without blocking learning it.

The soft signal: affinity & disaffinity

Affinity and disaffinity are weighted, directed, general-purpose edges — { target: weight }. Crucially they are not a discovery knob; they are a neutral signal that many subsystems read, each interpreting it through the types at the two endpoints:

Consumer	How it reads the edge
Discovery	held affine memes raise the target’s discovery odds
Transmission	affinity eases teaching / learning
Enactment	a `doctrine → praxis` affinity impels performance; disaffinity is a taboo
Conviction / identity	holding disaffine memes creates dissonance (feeds schism)
Specialisation	affinity clusters are what niches and careers emerge from

So the single doctrine → praxis affinity you author as “this is enjoined” is read by enactment, transmission, and identity at once — author once, used many ways. This is the mechanism that replaced the old “custom” type. An optional via: [...] scopes an edge to specific channels when the universal default is wrong.

Conflict

Conflict ({ target: weight }, doctrine-only) means holding both generates dissonance and one displaces the other — the engine behind Conviction & Conflict: schism, reformation, conversion. It is treated as symmetric.

The negative-relationship ladder

Three rungs of “A is bad for B”, softest to hardest:

Disaffinity — soft, weighted, multi-use; makes things harder or avoided.
Conflict — active displacement between doctrines.
none prerequisite — hard: you cannot even acquire B while holding A.

Size

Size is an integer magnitude; the discovery logic uses it as a denominator on independent invention — bigger memes are rarer and need a larger or better-conditioned society to arise. “Conditions just right” is the affinity environment lowering that bar, so a small but intensely specialised society can still leap to a high-size meme in its niche. See Discovery.

Notes

Soft prerequisites live in affinity — a strong affinity, not a gate.
Niches are emergent, not declared. A niche emerges from the pattern of shared prerequisites + mutual disaffinity / conflict in the graph.