Nakatomi Drift

I’ve been muddling through ways to stay interesting – to myself and friends – in the age of AI. Part of the answer, I have come to understand, is the construction of Thickets. Dreaming up such a thing without a way to traverse it kept the idea incomplete. One nagging thought was that it was important to get properly lost – as opposed to trivially lost. That feeling where you had a good sense of where you were, but a question you asked or a connection you made has left you in unfamiliar territory. Excitingly so.

I call this the Nakatomi Drift. Yes, this essay comes with a soundtrack.

Kordhell, Murder in My Mind — drift music for the ventilation shaft · watch on YouTube

Before all that, we need to start with the basics because although I’ve written about Thickets for a while now, I’ve only recently arrived at a more complete vocabulary for them. We will talk, of course, about Thickets – Space, Place, affordances, Portals – and then the Nakatomi Drift – this em-dash for effect :P

Space, Place, and Portals #

Yi-Fu Tuan was a philosopher and geographer who wrote, “Place is security, Space is freedom.” For Tuan, Space and Place are not simply large versus small geographic areas. Space is associated with movement, openness, freedom, possibility, and exposure. Place arises through pause, familiarity, value, and orientation. Crucially, each requires the other: movement through Space produces Places, while established Places allow us to perceive and venture into Space.

• A Place is a stabilized body of meaning: a book, theory, discipline, metaphor, problem, technique, community, or even a particular reading of a text.
• Space is the less determined field of possible movement around and between those Places.
• A Place lets you stand somewhere, but it also makes certain moves imaginable.
• Space is not just everything you do not yet know. It is the experienced availability of further movement.

So, Space is something for you to get lost in and explore, but it has to be structured in a particular way and approached through a Portal. A library containing ten million books does not necessarily provide much intellectual Space. It may be highly searchable, categorized, and optimized in ways that keep returning you to the same conceptual neighbourhoods. Conversely, three carefully juxtaposed books might suddenly disclose enormous Space. A Portal is an arrangement of Places that transforms the Space of possible movement.

Portals aren’t simply paths or protocols to follow that take you to a specific destination or give you a defined experience. Portals alter what can be reached, noticed, or conceived.

The Thicket is a Place-complex that produces Space #

In The Birth of Thickets, I described thicketing as “the act of noticing, dwelling, and thriving in an emergent niche. But you don’t build a thicket.” You don’t build a thicket because it is the Space that you will actually explore, but where does the Thicket – the niche – emerge from?

The Thicket is not synonymous with openness or free association. It is not a blank field of ideas. A thicket consists of many particular, partially stabilized Places:

• a passage from Tuan;
• an obsolete scientific model;
• a film image;
• a strange blog post;
• a technical method;
• an unresolved personal question;
• an analogy that almost works;
• a contradiction between two traditions.

Each Place has its own affordances. I don’t usually make lists, but this essay ended up having quite a few. That’s because I’m trying to partially stabilize the Space with well-understood Places. But because they are entangled without being fully systematized, their affordances interact.

If you are only in geography, or perhaps only in philosophy, you may ask, on reading Tuan:

“What did Tuan mean?”

But putting Tuan next to Debord, Feyerabend, and Die Hard As we are doing. may afford construction:

“Can intellectual environments be designed to reveal unintended routes?”

Tuan’s idea – the Place – doesn’t change internally. Its relational position has changed, and therefore the Space available from it has changed.

This gives the thicket a useful formal definition:

A thicket is a dense ecology of Places whose overlapping affordances create more possible transitions than can be represented by an established map.

Its portal quality comes from excess reachability. You enter through recognizable Places but discover that the available exits exceed their conventional functions.

Psychogeography as wayfinding #

Guy Debord and Asger Jorn, The Naked City (1957). The streets that would join these districts have been cut away, leaving only the ambiances and the currents that actually carry you between them — a map of movement rather than of ground. OR how you wish your wiki looked

Psychogeography adds something Tuan does not emphasize as strongly: environments are not passive. Their arrangement produces currents, attractions, barriers, dead zones, and habitual paths. Psychogeography was developed as an idea distinctly about cities and how different places make you feel, hold your attention, or make some actions impossible.

The signature practice is the dérive – usually translated as drift. The dérive, as a way to explore the city, is not simple randomness. It suspends normal purposes while remaining acutely responsive to the environment’s attractions and resistances. Debord describes it as playful and constructive, distinct from an ordinary stroll.

During a dérive, you temporarily abandon your normal reasons for moving: commuting, shopping, exercise, sightseeing, or reaching a destination. You allow features of the environment to influence your route – changes in sound, density, atmosphere, architecture, light, smell, or social activity. Debord described it as rapid movement through varied ambiances, combining openness to the terrain with active observation of its effects.

Ambiance is a useful psychogeographic concept. An ambiance is the total felt character of a place: not just architecture but sound, temperature, lighting, movement, social expectations, historical associations, and your own bodily state.

You can often detect an ambiance through transitions:

• the moment restaurant seating gives way to loading docks;
• the point where pedestrians abruptly disappear;
• the shift from independent shops to blank façades;
• the place where you begin checking behind you;
• the boundary where children are suddenly present;
• the street on which conversation becomes difficult because of traffic.

These transitions may reveal the city more accurately than official neighbourhood boundaries.

An intellectual dérive would therefore mean:

Temporarily abandon the normal purpose for which you entered a body of knowledge, and allow its local affordances to redirect you.

Normally, when reading a paper, you have an itinerary:

• Understand the claim.
• Assess the evidence.
• Extract what is relevant.
• Return to your project.

That is equivalent to walking through a city using turn-by-turn directions.

During an intellectual dérive, you might instead follow:

• a term that feels oddly chosen;
• a citation that appears peripheral;
• an analogy the author abandons;
• an outdated theory mentioned only to be dismissed;
• a methodological tool into a domain where it allegedly does not belong;
• a contradiction between the paper’s formal method and its informal imagery;
• a strong emotional response whose source you cannot explain.

You are mapping intellectual ambiance: where thought accelerates, becomes constrained, feels inhabited, feels exposed, or seems to contain an unexplored exit. Productive getting lost is not the abandonment of orientation. It is the abandonment of a destination while preserving sensitivity.

Nakatomi Space – anything goes #

Feyerabend’s “anything goes” is commonly interpreted as “all methods are equally good.” His more interesting argument is that no universal methodological rule survives the actual history of scientific progress. Rules that appear rational in the abstract can prevent the development of alternatives needed to expose the limitations of dominant theories.

A method is a Place. It stabilizes activity and provides reliable affordances. But when the method becomes compulsory, the Place expands until it occupies the entire perceived Space. Feyerabend’s theoretical pluralism gives us permission to use alternative frameworks to disclose observations that remain invisible within the dominant framework. A supposedly wrong theory may still function as an instrument for perceiving what the accepted theory is blind to.

This is a little like Obliquity. You can use astrology, science fiction, medieval cosmology, an obsolete statistical method, a child’s misunderstanding, or a bad analogy to open a path. That does not require you to accept its truth claims. Its value may lie in the Space it discloses rather than the Place it ultimately becomes. As my AI said to me: “Feyerabend’s counterinduction punches a hole through the wall.” You have watched Die Hard, right?

Geoff Manaugh’s “Nakatomi Space” describes built environments becoming traversable through routes that their official architectural organization does not recognize: ventilation shafts, maintenance passages, unfinished floors, cavities, infrastructure, and openings created by force. The building reveals a near-infinite interior when used against its intended circulation plan.

The intellectual equivalent is very strong.

A body of literature has an official architecture:

• disciplines;
• canonical interpretations;
• introductions and conclusions;
• schools of thought;
• chronological histories;
• accepted applications;
• citation networks;
• search keywords.

But it also has infrastructure:

• footnotes;
• metaphors;
• failed experiments;
• terminological accidents;
• historical disputes;
• imported methods;
• suppressed alternatives;
• tacit assumptions;
• strange examples;
• concepts used instrumentally but never examined.

The usual scholar – not you, darling – enters through the lobby and takes the elevator to the designated floor, or is led there by AI. The Nakatomi reader crawls through the ventilation system. An intellectual Nakatomi move – the Nakatomi Drift – occurs when you use an idea through an affordance that was not part of its intended intellectual architecture.

For example:

• treating Tuan not as a geographer describing human experience, but as a theorist of knowledge navigation;
• treating psychogeography not as urban criticism, but as a method for literature exploration;
• treating Feyerabend not merely as a philosopher of science, but as a designer of controlled route-breaking;
• treating an action-film building as a model for the latent topology of a corpus.

This is more specific than interdisciplinarity. Interdisciplinarity often connects the front doors of two buildings. The Nakatomi Drift passes through their service infrastructure.

The Nakatomi Drift separates a thicket from a rubbish heap. The thicket permits almost anything to become a navigational affordance, while retaining later processes of testing, selection, articulation, and cultivation.

The thicket as an anticipatory environment #

There is a danger, though, in treating the Nakatomi Drift as merely a clever way of discovering hidden routes. That would still assume that the building is complete and that every route already exists somewhere inside it, waiting to be found. It would turn the unknown into an unread floor plan.

Tim Ingold gives us a more useful distinction: where intention is predictive, attention is anticipatory. Prediction projects a destination from the present and organizes action around reaching it. Anticipation moves into a world that is still taking form and becomes responsive to what appears there.

Ingold distinguishes not-knowing from ignorance. Ignorance assumes that the answer already exists and that someone simply lacks it. Not-knowing belongs to a world still in formation, where both the path and the thing being sought may change through the act of seeking.

Attention, for Ingold, has two sides: exposure and attunement. Exposure pulls you out of position. It removes the solid ground of understanding and leaves you vulnerable to whatever the world is doing. Attunement is the skill that follows: learning to notice the grain, current, pressure, or affordance well enough to continue moving.

Walking contains both. With every step you fall forward into a brief void and regain your footing when the other foot meets the ground. The next step begins from that newly acquired Place. Anticipation is not knowing where the ground will be while becoming capable of meeting it.

Rebecca Solnit gives the unknown its existential character. Losing something means that the familiar has diminished. Getting lost means that the unfamiliar has appeared and the world has become larger than your knowledge of it. The point is not to erase what you know, but to let it stop governing every possible arrival.

A thicket therefore has two complementary functions. It disorients, loosening the official routes between ideas. And it educates attention, making the thinker more sensitive to affordances that only become perceptible during movement. Without the first function, you remain on predictable paths. Without the second, you merely become lost.

The Portal is not a doorway between two already completed rooms. It is an arrangement of Places that changes what Space can become as you pass through it. A Nakatomi corridor may not simply be hidden in the walls; it may be activated, or even made, through the passage.

Prediction consults the building plan.

Randomness wanders through rooms.

Anticipation feels the wall for hollowness.

How getting lost produces new ideas #

New ideas probably do not arise from Space alone. Completely undifferentiated openness produces noise or paralysis. Nor do they arise from Place alone, because established Places tend to reproduce their own meanings. They arise through a repeated oscillation:

Place → Space → unexpected Place → enlarged Space

Or, with Ingold’s terms folded in:

Place → exposure → anticipatory movement → attunement → provisional Place → replenished Space

You depart from something sufficiently stable to push against. You enter a region where conventional movement is suspended. You encounter or construct a new temporary Place. From there, previously unavailable movement becomes possible.

Thus Thicketing is a combination of partially stabilizing a Thicket with Places, followed by Nakatomi Drifting. The iterations look like ratchets:

• A Place supplies an affordance.
• You misuse or extend that affordance.
• The move exposes an unrecognized relation.
• You pause and give that relation provisional form.
• The new Place changes the topology of the surrounding Space.
• You move again.

Tuan’s statement that Place is produced through a pause in movement is especially important here. Without pausing to name, sketch, write, or model what you encounter, you do not create a new Place. You merely wander. So productive getting lost requires alternating drift and arrest. Too much drift and nothing consolidates. Too much arrest and the thicket becomes an encyclopedia, or perhaps an overbearing LLM-wiki.

In retrospect, this is why essays became a critical part of the Protocol Institute Psychohistory special interest group (SIGPSY). An essay is not simply a report from the journey. It is the temporary Place made by stopping long enough to discover where you have arrived.

Why do this? #

Because AI is very good at navigating the official architecture. It can take the elevator to the right floor, summarize what is there, and propose reasonable connections to the neighbouring rooms. That is useful. It is also exactly why the human advantage may lie elsewhere: in choosing strange entrances, remaining exposed to the wrong material, and noticing affordances that no itinerary asked for.

The point is not to refuse maps. It is to stop mistaking the map for the limits of movement.

A working vocabulary #

Place – A stabilized centre of meaning and value that offers a particular set of intellectual actions.

Space – The agent-relative field of moves currently perceived as possible.

Affordance – A move made possible by the encounter between a particular thinker and a particular Place.

Portal – A configuration of Places that changes the thinker’s reachable Space.

Thicket – A portal composed of densely entangled Places whose interactions generate unintended routes.

Dérive – A mode of traversal that suspends predetermined destinations and follows local intellectual gradients.

Nakatomi Drift – Traversal through an unintended affordance: using the infrastructure of an idea rather than its official entrance.

Feyerabendian move – A sub-concept of the Nakatomi Drift: the deliberate violation of a dominant navigational rule to disclose terrain that the rule renders inaccessible.

Prediction – The projection of a future from possibilities that can already be represented in the present.

Anticipation – Attentive movement into a future whose path and relevant possibilities are still taking form.

Not-knowing – Openness to a world in formation, rather than the absence of an answer presumed to be complete elsewhere.

New idea – A newly stabilized Place produced by traversing a route not represented in the previous map.

The deepest consequence is that originality is not necessarily a property of an idea considered alone. It may be a property of the route by which Places were made adjacent.

A thicket does not manufacture originality by adding more content. It constructs conditions in which the thinker can move through content in ways that existing maps do not anticipate.

The purpose of the thicket is not to contain the unknown. It is to make unanticipated movement possible.

Paul Oakenfold, Ready Steady Go (Korean Style) · watch on YouTube

Coda #

The Space and Place vocabulary, and the formula “Place is security, Space is freedom,” come from Yi-Fu Tuan’s Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (1977). This essay is a direct continuation of The Birth of Thickets, which described the thicket as an emergent niche and a portal of curated Places opening onto an interior that remains Space. The move here is from the ontology of the thicket to the practice of traversing it.

Psychogeography and the dérive come from Guy Debord and the Situationist International. Debord’s method belongs to the city; using it as a practice for moving through literatures, theories, and intellectual ambiances is my extension.

The methodological permission comes from Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method. “Anything goes” here does not mean that every belief or method is equally true. It means that no method should be allowed to legislate in advance every route by which knowledge may arrive. The separation between permissive route generation and later testing, selection, and cultivation is mine.

“Nakatomi Space” is Geoff Manaugh’s, from his 2010 BLDGBLOG essay of that name: architecture traversed through ventilation shafts, maintenance systems, unfinished cavities, and other routes excluded from its official plan. The Nakatomi Drift – and the translation of those infrastructural passages into the latent topology of a body of ideas – is mine.

The distinction between prediction and anticipation, intention and attention, ignorance and not-knowing, as well as the paired movements of exposure and attunement, come from Tim Ingold’s “On not knowing and paying attention: How to walk in a possible world”. His walker falls forward into exposure and recovers through attunement. I have treated that alternation as the temporal engine of the thicket.

The unknown as something more than missing information comes from Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost. The formulation that getting lost is the unfamiliar appearing – the world becoming larger than your knowledge of it – is hers, encountered again through Maria Popova’s essay on the book. Solnit gives the thicket its terra incognita: not an empty region awaiting completion, but a condition in which discovery remains possible.

A more immediate ancestor is Venkatesh Rao’s “How to Take Your Brain Off-Road”. Rao’s disorderly reader becomes lost by no longer knowing how to read, navigates the intertwingled territory of ideas by gut feel, and resists the maps that accumulated knowledge makes too easy to follow. The Nakatomi Drift is my attempt to give that off-road reader a spatial vocabulary, an architecture, and a method of movement.