The Telic Way: When Persuasion Becomes Capture Non-Violent Agency Threats (NVATs) and the Law of Manipulation at Scale

Most modern autonomy harms do not arrive as violence or censorship. They arrive as architecture: engineered exposure environments that train re-entry, intercept empirical correction, narrow exploration, and make exit predictably fail—often gradually, invisibly, and at scale. This paper proposes Non-Violent Agency Threats (NVATs) as a viewpoint-neutral legal model for naming and regulating that class of harm without sliding into paternalism or doctrine control. NVATs are defined as foreseeable, cumulative constraint on “resolution space”—the live option-set and salience structure through which agents close uncertainty into action—imposed without informed consent through informational, psychological, developmental, or architectural manipulation. The framework draws a hard line between persuasion and capture: ordinary influence remains protected; strong remedies trigger only at a material threshold, evidenced by durable exit impairment, exploration collapse, or compulsion dynamics. To prevent abuse, the doctrine is bounded by a central constraint: mechanisms may be regulated; doctrines may not. The paper (i) distinguishes NVAT-I (chronic, low-intensity, high-duration architectural constraint) from NVAT-II (capture mechanisms producing severe exit impairment), (ii) proposes a mechanism test for capture-capable design, (iii) provides evidentiary pathways that do not require mind-reading or full disclosure of proprietary internals, and (iv) recommends non-censorious remedies aimed at restoring intelligibility, reversibility, testability, and exit integrity. The result is a judge-realistic translation: not a new right against persuasion, but an old cluster of wrongs executed through new machinery.