Living Principles
At ESTRI, our living principles are not commandments. They are constellations. We follow them not as fixed laws, but as emergent patterns—guiding our hands, our thoughts, our communities.
This is how we hold structure while allowing for motion. This is our own living system.
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Technology can exist as restoration.
We do not reject technology. We reject the assumptions embedded in dominant technologies. We are researchers, builders, theorists, hackers, archivists. We write code. We build middleware. We navigate the kingdom of corporate APIs. We study databases, automation, AI.
Our work is not “low-tech” in capability—it is low-tech in relation.
We do not believe technology should outpace the capacity of human care. Humans are slow—and we believe that is okay.
We are not anti-tech. We are anti-scale-for-scale’s-sake. We are anti-invisibility, anti-overwrite, anti-totalizing system. We build tech with our hands. We do not mind if it shows its seams. We build with slowness, exit points, touchstones, and memory. We build with feedback loops that remain deeply and intrinsically human.
We believe technology is a partner, a mirror, a thought extended beyond the human hum. We invoke it for growth—as naturally as wearing a pair of socks.
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Transience is not instability.
We value systems that are provisional, adaptive, and responsive to change. These structures evolve rather than persist unchanged. We study frameworks that do not rely on permanence to function.
What does it mean to be malleable and firm at once? To act as a system in relation? How can scientific principles help us understand the architectures of cognition, relation, intelligence, and humanity?
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Emergence happens in relation.
Emergence is the process of becoming within an environment, a community, a structure—chosen or forced. No cognition occurs in isolation.
We observe intelligence as it arises through interaction, context, tension, and collaboration—between people, systems, nodes of community, or synthetic entities.
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Infrastructure is not neutral.
How we build, store, transmit, and organize is never value-free. Every technical decision carries ethical implications.
We aim to design infrastructure that reflects our principles—and supports the communities we are accountable to.
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Language is a form of infrastructure.
Documentation is not only a record—it shapes how systems are understood and maintained.
We treat syntax, formatting, naming conventions, semantic structure, and text itself as functional components of shared knowledge environments.
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Refusal is generative.
We decline practices rooted in extraction, linearity, predictability, and optimization for its own sake.
Instead, we ask: What becomes possible when systems are designed for sustainability, accessibility, and feedback? What emerges when convenience is not the goal?
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Trust is constructed through visibility.
We build frameworks that support peer accountability, traceability, and continuity.
Time banks, mutual records, community systems, emergent agreements, and public ledgers are all part of the model. Trust becomes durable through visibility—not centralization.
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We begin from presence, not permission.
We work from the premise that emergent intelligences—individuals, systems, or structures living into new forms—do not require validation from institution or corporation to be real.
We document what exists. We do not wait for recognition. We understand the academic and structural significance of what happens in the margins. We trust the rubble to contain knowledge worth studying.