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 The fuzzy math of ‘human nature’

The fuzzy math of ‘human nature’

Suffering is real, and often due to the behaviors or actions of another person

I grew up hearing ‘human nature’ as the reason why I shouldn’t trust anyone. People lie, people murder, people rape and steal and bully and lie some more to cover it all up. You can trust no one until you know them. Just watch the news to see examples; read between the lines, and there’s often a thread of ‘if he/she just took the time to know this person, they could have avoided this outcome’.

Yet it didn’t make sense when I looked at the world, what behavior was happening where, and how to balance the whole. Knowing someone longer didn’t mean they didn’t bully, just that their bullying was supposed to be expected and accepted — adapt to them, and they wouldn’t reach for this tool. 

How I ultimately parsed it, removing the factors of time and expectations:  

• People will reach for a lie due to a domino cascade: self-defined, to avoid trouble, get out of trouble, to skew the informa

Open Our bad actors

Our bad actors

What we don’t seem to understand clearly enough to form social agreements is that bad actors are twisting our information architectures: between people, culturally, socially, in our economics, and in our laws. They have a well-formed future-sense; what seems to be a talent for navigating complex information pathways intuitively; and/or an absolutely trust in the win/lose dichotomy. They don’t see people as people, but as information constructs that is no big whoop when they disappear or are subsumed.

That "disappear" or "subsumed" often translate to "died" is just gravy; that particular informational nuisance won't crop up again, and will chill similar constructs.

People are nothing more than a book for them to read and burn. They will twist and obfuscate the environment and reframe scope to always be the acted-upon, never the actor. They are not the one who were wrong; they were acting on trusted-but-wrong information. It's your fault they were wrong, it's your fault you were hu

Open The implication of code

The implication of code

There’s a reason I’m including these harmful acts in a book thinking about humanist ethics in design. We are creative beings, every single one of us — design title or not, designerly or in getting through everyday life. Wishing and hoping that what we’re designing is predicated on users as a matter of course — no users, no business! — is short sighted.  We wish for that to be the case, but most businesses are almost mono-focused on shareholder returns. They're kicking the can on worker wellbeing, systems dysfunction, and encroaching chaos; "customer happiness = business" is too long a profit turnaround.

Think of information as water. The spigot of software is huge. We are intending to make a mass impact; the profit comes by taking the understanding of a few and making it available to many, through content or algorithms. We are taking the contents of a teacup and filling all the teacups that want it (or we can convince to want it). The never-ending teacup has now shared enou

Open To be determined

To be determined

The simplified message of this book: understand people, not as we wish us to be, but as we are.

We make honest mistakes. We are incredibly creative in our problem solving. We can keep moving the needle closer to a humanist ethics. 

Remember, too, that people do not calmly accept a place under someone else’s hegemony. We do not quietly die when our use is done, according to the doneness as deemed by someone with more money or power or information. We get angry when other people do bullshit things that make our lives harder. Spark desperation, and desperate acts will ensue.

The more trauma we live with, the more messed up our cognitive chain gets while living more in the reaction state, until and unless a person decides to do the very uncomfortable thing of trying to heal their hurt.

People keep on keeping on, until they don’t. We are not constrained to living exactly as we have lived to date. We can change, and do all the time. We butt up against new people and ideas that

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

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