Companion to The HECC Manifesto. This glossary defines the framework’s named concepts, structural terms, historical anchors, and methodology bridge — written in plain language and designed for quick reference.
The four named HECC concepts. The intellectual core of the framework.
Human Effort Compression Cycle (HECC)
The repeating pattern by which a new technology compresses a category of human effort, displaces the people whose livelihoods depended on that effort, and elevates a new layer of work above what was compressed.
Five waves have run since agriculture. The fifth is AI - Artififical Intelligence.
Acceleration Build-Up
The period between waves when humans deepen the compression of an existing effort category — refining the tools, scaling the systems, saturating the layer — without yet opening a new one above it.
The decades of factory mechanization between steam and electrification were an Acceleration Build-Up. So were cloud and social media, for the Internet wave.
Ignition Trigger
The democratization and the moment a technology crosses the threshold from experiment to scale, from restricted to universal, from the hands of the few to the hands of everyone.
The web browser triggered the Internet wave. ChatGPT was the Ignition Trigger of the cognitive wave.
Judgment Amplification
The mechanism of Wave 5: AI compresses the routine cognitive work that used to surround judgment, so the people who keep doing judgment get more of it done in the same time — while the people who only did the routine work get displaced.
The marketing manager who used to spend three days drafting reports now reviews five strategic decisions in the same week. The amplification is judgment, not execution.
Adaptation window