Open Frontmatter

© 2025, Angela Madsen All rights reserved.

For Violet.

This book was written by a human mind with no AI assistance at any point in the process.

All confabulation is my own. All research gaps are my own. All interpretive thinking is my own. Annotations are the best I could manage with the timescapes involved, and will be continued to be worked for a while.

Three Buckminster Fuller structures are used in the Systems flow page; Manoogian & Benson's Cognitive Bias Codex is used on the Cognitive bias page; otherwise all images are created myself using either Affinity Design or sketching in Concept. This book has been through multiple versions, multiple software, and multiple structures through the five years I worked on articulating it. Tools have included Ulysses, Powerpoint, and Affinity Publisher.

Open Intentions

Intentions

My intention is to keep this up and free to read in this format until it's no longer viable, according to my own logic. This is a cost for me to do, so it is unreasonable to expect that it will available forever.

This is copyrighted, and I reserve my rights. Use with attribution is normal. Copying is bad ethics. Scraping it for AI is bad ethics. Free to use is not free to abuse.

If it winds up being unexpectedly popular, I will look into publishing for a price (and thus a copy that would not fail based on my personal whims) and maybe setting up dropship printing for posters of some of the diagrams.

Anyone interested in defraying costs, buying me a coffee for my expertise/time, or otherwise supporting me are welcome to do so via a pay-what-you-want model.

An email drop has been set up at movements. I have no idea what my cadence for checking it will be, or how done I'll get how

Open Internal-external connections

Internal and external connections

This book is where I got to after decades of watching and testing. I was brought up primed to see the worst of us. Set aside expectations, approach the problem with acceptance of the actual behaviors and context, and they simply are not the most of us. But, and here’s the key: those who truly are dark triad, and not just replicating their behavior because they’ve witnessed it too much, will not change. The only successful way of dealing with them is to not allow them access to you — not physically, not in your career, for all that's good avoid them in positions of power, and definitely not in social media.

And, to be clear, this is after decades of information ingesting, watching, and testing. Decades of information ingestion, with so many reference points that had concepts that stayed with me, but which I can't for the life of me trace now (there's one book I've been trying to trace on and off for over 15 years, literally hundreds of hours trying to find the specific

Open Links to full book

Movements is a book in six parts

Part 1: Introduction

Part 2: Information

Part 3: Who-ness

Part 4: People and time

Part 5: Fractal implications

Part 6: Appendix

Open Design ethics

Information technology design ethics

Approaching humanism through the lens of understanding people in a snap

Once upon a time, I looked for missing books at my college library. I had one of the best finding rates of anyone that had that position before me, and for years after. The secret to my success was in looking for each book as though it were a story: a person pulled it off the shelf for a reason, and a person put it away.  

I used the information I had — the Library of Congress (LOC) codes, or if some subjects had multiple books missing. But it was always how people interacted with information that made the story, and the story that helped me find the books. The data was static, the LOC code very clearly telling everyone where it belonged in space. In between removing it and placing it on a shelf were all the things that could happen as a book was moved and leveraged, and all the things that tired, stressed, excited, etc., people do. The LOC was orientation, findability, and navigation. Th

Open The weight of our decisions

The weight of our decisions

Designing isn't simple

Individual agency exists even if we don’t program for it; but as we document data and feed more of it through our information technology, where we don’t support agency becomes an ersatz morality police that most of us don’t even intend. Most of it is simply the quick regurgitation of how one or a handful of people have figured out their path through a problem set, and then spent their time trying to get it programmed.

The reality is that the fewer people who were involved in the testing and figuring out of the process, the more likely it’s a finite slice of potential rather than a composite. The problems are twofold: the complexity of the process, and the willingness of people to run with outputs when they don’t understand the logic of the process. Small, finite processes mostly don’t do to badly — or fail so blatantly that they are hot-fixed. Complex processes are more prone to automation bias, in turn leading to all kinds of pervasive algori

Open Information architecture as a facet of our social makeup

Information architecture as a facet of our social makeup

How many apps are you going to touch today? I’ve been awake half an hour and already focused on 6 — not just glance through, but 6 that became the center of attention for at least a minute. 

Apps are tools specifically designed to manage, share, move, update, and work with information. That’s their sole function, all of them. Every pixel rendered, every keystroke or finger poke translated to a letter on your screen, is information. Regardless of whether that information was ultimately used to design water main structures, text your mom, play a game, or read the news — none of it was possible without the movement of information. 

The workings of apps tends to be more complex. Developers more or less dip their toes in network every time they call the output of one function into another function, whether they are maintained as deep lines of code or as separate files. That ease of writing, “make a new connection right here” regardless of parent-c

Open How to manage people

How to manage people?

We don’t, not on the level that question implies.

We are not all white men. We are not all in perfect health until the day we die, or sick in a way mainstream medicine can label and solve. We don’t all easily stomach opportunism to gain our survival, prefering to live life simply or humanistically or in some other modality that does not put money first, and are tired of barely squeaking by because those who embrace opportunism use it to argue for more-from-your-less. So, in a state of culture where we want to believe that humanity can survive all the twists and foibles of the universe, first we need to wrap our heads around supporting the full breadth of humanity.

The biggest reason why: we do not know the full breadth of the universe, and the only way we survive the unknown is through diversity. Diverse biology, diverse thought, diverse ideas, diverse cultures, and diverse, robustly healthy systems of information.  

Since money is currently our primary reason for doing,

Open Garbage in, garbage out

Garbage in, garbage out

Our ongoing formulation of what-is truth

Truth is hard. It’s ultimately a binary state attributed to a complex compilation and interpretation of a set of data and information. It’s leveraged as a springboard into decision making, cultural norms, and society-level agreements. 

It is a characteristic that is bandied about with great flair, emphasis, and passion. It’s also dependent on information, which can be adhering to reality, or a confabulation of cognitive bias, storytelling, and/or shaky memory. It can have within its construction misapprehension, misguided facts, misinformation, and even disinformation and outright lies predicated on manipulation. And because it’s a simplified construct of a complex amalgamation of data and information, one person’s truth can be another person’s falsehood. 

Because it’s a simplified construct of a complex amalgamation of data and information, the perception of truth and falsehood can both be right based on that amalgamation, plus

Open Reductionism and truthiness

Reductionism and truthiness

• The healthy human temperature is 98.6º F. -  Man marries woman.
• The world is flat.

All of these have been believed to be THE absolute truth. 

All of them are not quite right, and definitely not absolute. They are highly synthesized, simplified narrative truths. 

Solitary simple “truths” are easy to pin down to an easy answer. It’s easy to remember and hard to misunderstand. They springboard to the next part of the decision-making process easily, and define an easy, statistically relevant cause and effect. Isn’t easy supposed to be better?

According to some points of view, it also provides clarity: alternative answers can’t be right, because we have the answer.

However, it does not account for change. It doesn’t account for nuances that offset instances to create an overall balance that makes the single metric less meaningful. It makes it too easy to dismiss the outliers — to dismiss the quality of truth for narrative truth. It makes it easy to pr

Open Labeled fantasy

Labeled fantasy

I believe (and I try to avoid saying “believe” lightly) that people are fully capable of compartmentalizing the funky truths of fantasy and fiction away from the narrative/perceptual/quality truths that they use to get through their days. 

This seems to be up for debate. The idea that the information we ingest as part of what we read and the games we play crops up like a Whack-a-mole periodically, with the most traction being when Tipper Gore convinced enough people that parental warnings needed to go on certain music. 

It’s living and breathing today with book burning and removing books from libraries. Both are instances of neutralizing dissonant data in order to better support the interpretation wanted. In other words, it's a behavior of a low reality adhesion threshold trying to force reality to match interpretation. I don't think they understand that they are on the road to tyranny; however, that doesn't change the fact that every book burned or otherwise made unavailable is ano

Open We can't get traction doing everything all at once all the time

We can’t get traction doing everything all at once all the time

That’s the tricky part: we need to be able to work in realistic subsets to gain understanding. 

The models in this book are expansive. They are intended to be high enough in the strata to give a little memory boost to what might be going awry when something isn’t working for people. 

The details are blurry, and that’s on purpose. We are learning all the time. There will be wrongheadedness embedded in some of my “good enough for now” foundations.  We are learning that 98.6º F is a very common baseline, health-indicating human temperature, but it’s not the only one. Wearable technology lead the way on this, not medicine. The sensors could either be broken, the person always sick, or…98.6 was a narrative-truth mean, confabulated as a singular quality of truth. 

Some of us are very, very clear that marriage is between any people who are intent on building a life together. Others of us will harm any aspect of an individual’s environment