Research wiki

Exported 2026-10-26 21:08. 129 pages. Private pages and James's lean notes are left out of this version; links to them show as grey text.

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.

Departure in Place: the map

The hub: Departure in place. Nodes tagged updated this week changed since 2026-10-19.

1. The condition. substrate-maintenanceupdated this week: industrial flow systems degrade the substrates their currents depend on. An age of crisis, not a crisis (macro-viewupdated this week, civilizational-transitionupdated this week). The PMC is held in place by dependency chains, not attitudes (pmc-dependency-chainsupdated this week).
2. The audience. Tech workers, product builders, the PMC; the aim, the great simplification and the June 2026 vocabulary are on pmc-dependency-chainsupdated this week. Written from inside the condition (writing-from-insideupdated this week). Not prepping (relocalisation-beyond-preppingupdated this week); communities of dependency, not of discourse (porous-communityupdated this week).
3. The operation. Two axes, spatial and social (departure-spatial-socialupdated this week). Neti-neti: clear captured frames, install none (clearing-captured-framesupdated this week). The transition runs on the declining system's resources (writing-from-insideupdated this week).
4. The metaphysics. Relational panpsychism, dual-aspect monism (relational-ontologyupdated this week); subjects through closureupdated this week; graded-ethicsupdated this week; beauty-as-perceptionupdated this week; animism-as-perceptionupdated this week.
5. The physics-and-systems bridge. constructal-lawupdated this week; its corollary substrate-maintenanceupdated this week; convergent-signaturesupdated this week; the unified-critiqueupdated this week.
6. The politics. porous-communityupdated this week; minimum necessary legibility (commonsupdated this week); local perspectives without universalising narratives (Escobar's pluriverse); many last-era technologies will be valuable and convivial (convivial-computationupdated this week).
7. Form and container. An intellectual and practical synthesis project whose form is left open (James's correction, March 2026); a book is one container, and some pieces transmit better through practice. Written under his own name. Planned arc for the written form: lead with relocalisation and dependency-chain logic, arrive at class exit later, so readers recognise the condition before being asked to name it; the convergent-signatures material is load-bearing. An adjacent strand (June 2026): 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; building the social networks that soften the landing). Argument mode is right for that series. The writing is his (writing-is-hisupdated this week).
8. Relations to other projects. convivial-computationupdated this week is the active focus since Sept 2026, with DiP as its substrate. civilizational-transitionupdated this week feeds it. local-low-dependency-livingupdated this week is DiP applied to the household, and coaching-inquiryupdated this week a possible practice for leaders "aware of the need to depart". post-purpose-towns is field material.

Threads

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

Recently updated

• The belief machine: declared identity and its secular afterlife 2026-10-26
• Local hosting is not totalizing, and can be cheaper per user or community 2026-10-26
• Local inference is not totalizing, and can be cheaper per user or community 2026-10-26
• A provider is totalizing only if the whole category of need is lost with it 2026-10-26
• Ops labour falls, and distributed provision spreads it rather than concentrating it 2026-10-26
• Open components can reproduce a frontier subscription without the rent 2026-10-26
• Technology should fit the living wholes it serves 2026-10-26
• Unified critique 2026-10-26
• What James wants this wiki to become 2026-10-26
• Privacy-first location intent sharing 2026-10-26
• Games Newswire, a news aggregator he built 2026-10-26
• Deterministic supervisor for agent work 2026-10-26

…and 70 more pages updated on 2026-10-26; see the log.

Contested claims

1. Convivial technological futures (computation as his lens)

• Local inference is not totalizing, and can be cheaper per user or community · tested by: 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 · tested by: 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 · tested by: 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 · tested by: a capability-by-capability comparison of hosted products and open stacks

Other

• Local hosting is not totalizing, and can be cheaper per user or community · tested by: 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