Curiosity driven Research
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.
Start by reading widely and deeply.
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.
AI interlocutors are not neutral. They carry embedded assumptions, tend toward certain framings, and shape the inquiry in ways that are not always visible in a polished summary. Publishing the raw exchange as well as the conclusion makes that influence visible and therefore auditable.
The conversations are long. They contradict each other. Some lead nowhere. Some are just plain wrong. That's accurate documentation of how inquiry actually works. You can read the work as research and as evidence simultaneously.
The Courses of Inquiry hold the extended work — AI conversation threads of 2000 to 40 000 words, chunked into readable pieces but continuous in argument.
How complex systems organise themselves, how authority emerges and who is being rendered legible, to whom, and at what cost. Analysis conducted from the position of the person the structure might absorb. Mapping with skin in the game.
How a life is maintained as an individual, how a self stays a self against systems and what it costs to live inside the gap between what a structure claims to be doing and what it's actually doing. Boundary maintenance from the position of the person the structure wants to absorb. Body-soul-spirit as intertwining systems.
Pattern, resonance, and the deep grammar of systems that work. Draws on music theory, mathematics, and the structural logic underlying apparently unrelated disciplines. Rarely resolved but always interesting.
Curiosity voyages, carry-on travel, the trailer build, the Pipistrel journey. Traced because they're interesting experiences, not because they need theorising. Autonomy practised rather than studied. Affiliate links do appear in Terrain because the gear described is real and occasionally worth buying.