The Thicket on Aneesh Sathe

Nakatomi Drift

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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.

On Thickets, Enclosure, and Leaving

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Over the past few months I have discovered and written about the idea of thickets and have been wondering what the practice of thicketing looks like. At its core the idea behind thicketing is to create and dwell in systems that resist capture and defy legibility. Weirdly this is not some anti-establishment move but a simple desire to just be and return to a state where you had your own corner, your friends, and your thoughts. Over the past few hundred years, with the ascent of modernity, legibility and legibilizing have been treated as the norm and a default good thing. However the pattern which has emerged (not just on the internet) is that systems position themselves as commons, invite people to enjoy themselves and slowly initiate capture mechanisms under the guise of some or the other security. Not all of this is bad, much of the modern world would not function without security and minimal enclosures.

The Birth of Thickets

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The legibility regime runs one operation. It converts Space into Place, and everything else it does follows from that.

Space is the undifferentiated field. It holds every possibility and offers no orientation, which is why standing in it feels less like freedom than like vertigo. Draw a boundary around part of it, name what is inside, and you have made a Place. A farm is a Place; beyond the fence is forest. Drawing that boundary is the first act of thought, because you cannot know anything you have not first cut out from everything else. The trouble begins when the operation runs everywhere, on everything, at once, until it stops being thought and becomes weather.

The Kernel and the Ark

Sun, 11 Jan 2026 08:28:42 +0000

I. The Wall and the Infinite #

It is possible that the history of the modern West hinges on a single, melancholic misreading of Voltaire. When Candide, exhausted by the Lisbon earthquake and the brutalities of the Seven Years’ War, finally withdraws to the banks of the Propontis to utter his famous dictum—“Il faut cultiver notre jardin”—he is not proposing a program of agricultural management. He is issuing a plea for containment. To cultivate a garden, in the shadow of such overwhelming chaos, is an act of stoic resignation. It is an admission that the world is too vast, too violent, and too unintelligible to be governed by reason. One builds a wall against the infinite, and within that limited circumference, one tends to the soil. The garden is a refuge from nature.

The Architecture of Resistance

Tue, 23 Dec 2025 05:38:32 +0000

The seventeenth-century Hague, the mid-twentieth-century Levant, and the digital terraforming of 2025 have a shared preoccupation with the “Average.” Whether it is the theologian’s way or predictive stats, control begins by smoothing out the landscape. The project of power is a project of cartography and illumination—an attempt to banish the dark corners where the unmapped might grow. Thus, the history of resistance, of being “against the world”, is less a history of rebellion than a history of seeking cover.