What is ZTES?
Zero Trust Event Systems (ZTES) is a discipline for designing, validating, and operating real‑time event flows across multiple systems without relying on trust, assumptions, or hidden state. It ensures every event is correct, complete, ordered, and verifiable from origin to outcome.
ZTES eliminates drift, ambiguity, and silent failure by treating every event as a verifiable contract. Instead of trusting systems to behave correctly, ZTES reconstructs truth from the events themselves, enabling reliable automation, cross‑system coordination, and real‑time operational confidence.
Why ZTES Matters
Modern systems fail not because they are slow, but because they silently drift out of alignment. Data becomes inconsistent, events arrive out of order, and teams lose the ability to trust what they see. ZTES restores operational truth by ensuring every event is correct, complete, and verifiable.
Civilizational Primitives
The rare upgrades that change how humanity coordinates
Civilization doesn’t evolve gradually. It jumps. Every few centuries, humanity acquires a new primitive — a foundational capability that permanently expands what societies can build, coordinate, or trust.
These are not “technologies.” They are substrates. Once they exist, entire eras become possible.
1st–4th Century — The Codex
Portable, durable knowledge
11th–13th Century — Universities
Institutionalized learning
15th Century — Printing Press
Mass replication of ideas
16th–17th Century — Scientific Method
Self-correcting truth
13th–14th Century — Double-Entry Accounting
The substrate of capitalism
17th Century — Joint Stock Companies
Pooled risk, global trade
19th Century — Electricity
Universal energy substrate
19th Century — Railroads
Collapsed distance
19th Century — Telegraph
Collapsed latency
19th–20th Century — Telephone
Real-time global communication
19th–20th Century — Mass Education
Literate, skilled populations
1970s — Public Key Encryption
Trust without shared secrets
1970s–1990s — The Internet (TCP/IP)
Global digital coordination
2000s — Cloud Computing
Elastic global computation
2020s — Event Correctness
Truth that survives hostile custody. Events that prove themselves. The first correctness primitive for the adversarial internet.
For the first time since the invention of the internet, civilization gains a new substrate — a correctness layer for events.
This is the foundation of Zero Trust Event Systems.
About the Founder
Douglas E. Fisher is the founder and editorial steward of Zero Trust Event Systems (ZTES). He develops the discipline’s architecture, naming, and standards, ensuring every concept is precise, verifiable, and grounded in real-world operational truth. His work bridges technical rigor, narrative clarity, and institutional adoption.
His work is shaped by years spent inside real-world systems where correctness was assumed but rarely proven. That experience drives his commitment to building architectures that eliminate drift, restore trust, and give organizations a foundation they can rely on.