Research wiki

James Fairbairn's research wiki, shared with friends. Private pages and his notes on where he leans are left out, and links to them show as grey text. Last built 27 October 2026.

Departure in place

In one paragraph (his words, lightly trimmed). "Departure" means shortening the chains of dependency that hold a life in place (food, housing, healthcare, income, identity) and withdrawing allegiance from the frames that justify them. "In place" means doing this from inside (a salaried job, a rented house, a family) rather than through a dramatic exit. It is addressed to people at the rich Western end of industrial-technological late modernity (tech workers, product people, the professional-managerial class) who are inside the system that is unravelling and have no position of arrival to write from. Its underlying move is to clear captured frames, spiritual and economic alike, without installing a replacement. It is written for the rootless finding home, not for the already rooted.

The idea network

Everything here hangs off Departure in place. Each part of the network links to its own pages.

1. The condition. Industrial flow systems degrade the substrates their currents depend on (Substrate maintenance). We are in an age of crisis, not a crisis (An age of crisis, not a crisis, Civilizational transition). The professional-managerial class (the PMC) is held in place by dependency chains, not by attitudes (PMC and dependency chains).
2. The audience. Tech workers, product builders and the PMC. The aim, the great simplification and the vocabulary he took up in June 2026 are set out on PMC and dependency chains. The work is written from inside the condition (Writing from inside). It is not prepping (Relocalisation beyond prepping), and the communities it looks to are communities of dependency, not of discourse (The political principle).
3. The operation. Departure runs along two axes, the spatial and the social (Departure: spatial and social). Its method is neti-neti (Sanskrit, "not this, not this"): clear captured frames and install none in their place (Clearing captured frames). The transition runs on the declining system's own resources (Writing from inside).
4. The metaphysics. Relational panpsychism and dual-aspect monism (Living systems, panpsychism, ecological ethics). Subjects come into being through Closure. Ethics is graded (Graded ethics). Beauty and animism are both understood as kinds of perception (Beauty is a relational property, not an objective one, Animism as perception).
5. The physics-and-systems bridge. This rests on the Constructal Law and its corollary, Substrate maintenance, on the Convergent signatures, and on the Unified critique.
6. The politics. Community should be porous (The political principle). A community needs only the minimum necessary legibility, that is, it makes itself only as readable to outside institutions as it has to (Minimum necessary legibility). Local perspectives stand without universalising narratives, as in Escobar's pluriverse. Many last-era technologies will be valuable and convivial (Convivial computation: his line of thought).
7. Form and container. Since March 2026 James has treated this as an intellectual and practical synthesis project whose form is left open. A book is one possible container, and some pieces transmit better through practice. It is written under his own name. The planned arc for the written form leads with relocalisation and the logic of dependency chains and arrives at class exit later, so that readers recognise the condition before they are asked to name it. The convergent-signatures material is essential to it. Alongside it, from June 2026, sits a six-part reorientation series for tech workers: the collapsing narrative; what's coming; being ejected; useful work on the outside; subsistence in the low-energy economy; and building the social networks that soften the landing. Argument is the right mode for that series. The writing is his (The writing is his; the ideas orient the research).
8. Relations to other projects. Convivial computation: his line of thought has been his active focus since September 2026, with departure in place (DiP) as the ground it stands on. Civilizational transition feeds into it. What he wants and where is DiP applied to the household, and A possible future practice is a possible practice for leaders "aware of the need to depart". Communities that outlived their purpose is field material.

Threads

• 1. Convivial technological futures (computation as his lens)
• 2. How a transition actually happens
• 3. Place, membership, rootlessness
• 4. Where judgement belongs in a machine system
• 5. Mind and the machine
• 6. How people change
• 7. Instruments and constraint
• 8. Witnessing versus proof
• The thread under the threads (interpretation)

Recently updated

• UK food security: findings he holds 27 Oct
• Reference check of "The island that forgot 27 Oct
• Animism as perception 27 Oct
• Dark discourse 27 Oct
• Writing from inside 27 Oct
• Peter Asaro, 'Transforming Society by Transforming Technology: The Science and Politics of Participatory Design' (2000) 27 Oct
• Brigitta Hauser-Schäublin, 'Comment on Lansing/de Vet's paper' (2012) 27 Oct
• Lansing and Kremer, 'Emergent Properties of Balinese Water Temple Networks' (1993) 27 Oct
• Stockholm Environment Institute, 'Managing a Living Cultural Landscape: Bali's Subaks and the UNESCO World Heritage Site' (2015) 27 Oct
• Bali's water temples: a ritual institution that coordinates a watershed, and what outside regimes keep and drop 27 Oct
• The Lucas Plan (1976): skilled insiders who named the discourse and planned their way out 27 Oct
• Technology Networks (London, 1983-86): public workshops for socially useful production, and how their methods outlived their purpose 27 Oct

…and 4 more pages were updated the same day.

Claims being tested

Each page collects evidence for and against.

1. Convivial technological futures (computation as his lens)

• Local inference is not totalizing, and can be cheaper per user or community
  What would test it: per-user or per-community inference cost at realistic load, and lock-in (testbed has measured nothing yet).
• A provider is totalizing only if the whole category of need is lost with it
  What would test it: cases where losing one provider does or does not lose the whole category of need.
• Ops labour falls, and distributed provision spreads it rather than concentrating it
  What would test it: ops headcount per user, small operators against hyperscalers, and whether tooling lowered the skill floor.
• Open components can reproduce a frontier subscription without the rent
  What would test it: a capability-by-capability comparison of hosted products and open stacks.

Other

• Bali's water temples: a ritual institution that coordinates a watershed, and what outside regimes keep and drop
• Local hosting is not totalizing, and can be cheaper per user or community
  What would test it: cost per user or community for a realistic small operator against mega-cloud, and lock-in.

All pages

Disposition colours: contested live stated stable stub out-of-scope