Nakatomi Drift — Aneesh SatheSkip to content
World Machines · Book Club<br>Nakatomi Drift<br>How to Get Properly Lost<br>2 August 2026<br>· 15 min<br>· The Thicket · Nakatomi Drift · Psychogeography · Dérive<br>Text<br>Ragged<br>Justified<br>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.<br>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<br>Space, Place, and Portals<br>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.<br>A Place is a stabilized body of meaning: a book, theory, discipline, metaphor, problem, technique, community, or even a particular reading of a text.<br>Space is the less determined field of possible movement around and between those Places.<br>A Place lets you stand somewhere, but it also makes certain moves imaginable.<br>Space is not just everything you do not yet know. It is the experienced availability of further movement.<br>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.<br>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.<br>The Thicket is a Place-complex that produces Space<br>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?<br>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:<br>a passage from Tuan;<br>an obsolete scientific model;<br>a film image;<br>a strange blog post;<br>a technical method;<br>an unresolved personal question;<br>an analogy that almost works;<br>a contradiction between two traditions.<br>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.<br>But because they are entangled without being fully systematized, their affordances interact.<br>If you are only in geography, or perhaps only in philosophy, you may ask, on reading Tuan:<br>“What did Tuan mean?”
But putting Tuan next to Debord, Feyerabend, and Die Hard
As we are doing.<br>may afford construction:<br>“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.<br>This gives the thicket a useful formal definition:<br>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.<br>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<br>Psychogeography adds something Tuan does not emphasize as...