This site exists because C. Wright Mills was right: the personal is the intellectual raw material. Biography and history intersect. Serious thinking traces back to lived experience rather than arriving from abstract theory.
The work here follows an artisanal cycle. Lived experience generates curiosity. Curiosity becomes a research question. Research produces maps. Maps get tested against terrain. New terrain generates new curiosity.
That cycle has been running for forty years. This site is where it becomes visible.
The primary tool is conversation — extended dialogue with an AI interlocutor, thinking out loud in real time, the process recorded and published unfiltered. Not because the conclusions are always right, they often are not, but because the method is as useful as the outcome, sometimes more so.
The conversations are long. They contradict each other. Some lead nowhere. That's accurate documentation of how inquiry actually works.
The Collections of Chats below hold the extended work — AI conversations of 2000 to 40 000 words, chunked into readable pieces but continuous in argument. Each collection is a sustained investigation of one theme.
Field Notes are the opposite. Short form — stories and essays written in my own voice, without the conversational scaffolding of an AI exchange. Organised into the same five categories. Complete in themselves.
Books and Articles are just that: a collection of books and articles that I have either written myself or recommend.
How complex systems organise themselves, how authority emerges, how peripheral people maintain autonomy within or alongside structures that would absorb them.
The lived experience of organisations from the inside, the gap between formal structure and actual behaviour, the human cost of systems designed without human beings in mind.
Pattern, resonance, and the deep grammar of systems that work. Draws on music theory, mathematics, and the structural logic underlying apparently unrelated disciplines.
Health, cognition, ageing, the body-soul-spirit as intertwining systems. How a life is maintained as an individual and how to maintain boundaries with systems larger than us.
The lived counterpart to the theoretical work, a blog of sorts. The trailer build. The planned Pipistrel journey. Six months of carry-on travel. Autonomy practised rather than studied.