Minimum necessary legibility

How you get to commons from here: bottom-up, through "minimum necessary legibility". James Scott meeting Ostrom: legible enough to insiders to be governed, opaque enough to outsiders to resist enclosure.

Live: re-check with James before relying on this.

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Stealth and guile (April 2025)

His 2025 outline lists ways to protect break-away systems from co-optation: "legal avenues, decentralisation, building cultural legitimacy, networked federation and good old-fashioned stealth and guile" (dip-book-outline-2025, https://departurein.place/departure-in-place-an-outline-for-a-wildly-ambitious-book/), an early practical form of minimum necessary legibility.

Provenance: James, in conversation with Claude, 30 Sept 2026 (unverified). Disposition: live.

Related: convivial-computation, degrowth, porous-community

Part of thread: thread-transition