Dark Energy as Boundary Encoding: The Write Rate Drives the Expansion Rate

We conjecture that the expansion of the universe is driven by the rate at which irreversible processes in the bulk create classical records that must be encoded on the holographic boundary. In this picture, dark energy is not a substance, a field, or a vacuum energy. It is what expansion looks like from the bulk when the boundary accommodates new information. Every decoherence event, every photon absorbed, every bit of entropy produced by stars and black holes creates a record that the boundary must encode — and encoding requires the horizon area to grow. Following Jacobson's identification of the Einstein equation with $\delta Q = T dS$ at the horizon, the area growth is the expansion.