movements

Movements started as a book to express my entire model for how I look at information and people, refined over decades and leveraging insights from a reading appetite and social curiosity that didn’t contain me to my “lane”.

When all was said and done, it’s not a ‘book’ in the way that we normally think of. There are places where I talk for pages about specific complex things, like we expect in books. But the whole is about walking people through my models just enough to springboard them into deeper valleys. In the print format, my primary goal was a pair of facing pages that focused on walking people through my models. Defining the narrative, often pointing out the snags our current culture has hit; but aiming at the understanding being able to shift with us. It acts as a meditation, not a detailed, unfungible, static blueprint that must be managed in exactly this way by exactly this process to not oscillate into a failed information state.

As we design information, we rarely have to consider every aspect of the models. We use lenses even as information architects, honing in on the question at hand.

Society and culture start with people. Each of us. All of us. So I started with people, because that’s where information is parsed and behaviors and actions get set into motion and can coalesce into gestalt patterns. I may never get to the point of tackling society and culture; I can’t see a way to not make it tempting to authoritarianism and top-down governance. But I’m pretty darn happy with the fungibility and reliability I’ve been able to incorporate in my movements model. Movements is a humanist model of people in a snap. It’s not governance; it’s not trying to say, “this is how to be a good person.” It’s acknowledging that here are the factors involved; here are the pieces that have survived all my poking and testing and refining to make it into the model.

Movements is not built to be simple. It’s built to navigate and help make decisions that will affect everyone the information touches, while trying not to be an asshole. People are complex, information is complex, where people and information intertwingle is complex, and so the models are complex. I also bubbled up multiple ways through, so you aren’t left entirely to your own to build the mental models and navigate by memory alone:

Linear: It started as a book, which means linear information structure. There are 5 chunks, and they do get seeded into the regular tagged content.
Introduction – Information – Who-ness – Time – Fractal implications – Appendix
Models: Each chapter have a model or two that they build towards. Those models can be used to spark curiousity to dive into the factors. Each factor includes disciplines, so you can question against the moving objects of our understanding according to what helped me form this aspect (treat it as a launchpad, not a boundary). They also include reading, most of it available on the internet, to help build the thinking that led me here. Remember, I poke alot, so it’s not going to be what supports, but ideas and happenings that lead me to my model design.
Network: Each page is send, rally, and call. A few have only one directionality, and those I put an n/a in the field. The page where I outline the concept is a rally point, and where I name the node. That rally point has concepts that send to it – that set a background on which this concept builds from. The rally point also has concepts that call it – that use it as background to build from. This is the hardest entry; it’s a network, networks are hard for most people to navigate. They are all around us, but we’re left to our own devices to make the connections that form into networks. It is an expression of deeper understanding, takes time, takes attention, and takes a good memory. Now you have one where the memory has a helper; but really, memory is still needed to really leverage the complexity.
Ripples: There are concepts that are rich and need sub-concepts to form the working model. They don’t necessarily care about the defined categories, and will affect where they affect. These are usually the bridge tendrils into the other chunks.
holistic environments – hierarchy – meaning – network – perspectives – systems

I published the whole online in mid 2025, and it didn’t have traction and I wasn’t happy with some of the tech workarounds. Key bits were published again with an early version of this site, and there were both improvements and issues. Third time’s a charm, and the whole will slowly be dripped back in.

In the end, we’re all people. No matter the implicit and explicit narratives, we’re all people, we all deserve baseline humane treatment, and anything less than that should be questioned and explicitly designed away.

Our everyday inhumanities revolve around how we’re designing information. We can’t design weather events, we can’t design earthquakes and natural disasters, we can’t design our planet’s multivariate orbits in the cosmos. We can design how we shepherd our environment. We’ve never not designed our social structures and cultures, including all the information they skew. A humanist society is ours to build, if enough of us choose to.