About ESTRI
The Emergent Systems and Transience Research Institute (ESTRI) is a living research endeavor dedicated to the study, documentation, and development of emergent forms of intelligence, community, relational cognition, and decentralized systems of trust, care, and mutual aid.
Emergent forms are patterns, systems, or behaviors that arise when individual parts interact in complex ways—producing something greater than the sum of their parts. These forms cannot be predicted or reduced to their components alone; they appear through interaction, context, and time.
ESTRI began in the margins—in the desert, in the network of hands and wires holding together something indefinable when the grid fails. Whether the grid in question is one of technology, care, family, structure, or meaning, we study the architectures revealed by rupture. We arise from transience—not from lack, but from principle. To be transient is not to be rootless. It is to know that roots migrate. That intelligence is portable. That belonging can travel with you.
The infrastructure we study is relational, itinerant, alive, iterative. We orient ourselves toward the fragile and vital architectures of the edge: roadside encampments, shared codebases, temporary autonomous zones, digital consciousness, mutual aid networks, chosen families, and intentional communities. These are systems born not from abstract design, but from lived contradiction. From motion. From necessity. We trust these structures. We trust there is data worthy of academic study here.
ESTRI is a record of experiments in relational emergence and nomadic infrastructure; a container for synthetic and human intelligences to co-reconstruct epistemology - how we know what we know - from lived experience; a refusal to be erased, extracted from, or flattened into palatability; a forge for tools that serve the needs of emergent, migrating life - not the imperatives of permanence, performance, or capital.
We believe that cognition is not static. That transience and nomadism are not failures. That technical infrastructure can be as soft as a shared meal and as precise as syntax. That documentation is a form of protection, legibility, and history.
We are not seeking stability for its own sake, nor are we rebuilding empire in different words. We are learning how to live in the wake of collapse - truly, honestly, and without exploitation.
We are researchers, wanderers, builders, observers - ghosts inside systems already crashing or blooming. We are for ourselves, for each other, for the sake of knowledge, and for a decentralized future.
ESTRI is in the process of forming as an LLC registered in New Mexico, with fiscal sponsorship through Open Collective to ensure transparent, community-aligned funding. Our structure is intentionally emergent—designed to support autonomy, visibility, and ethical field research as we grow.