Vocabulary

The terms below are the working vocabulary Islands of Coherence uses. Each is defined in context for practitioners working in the traditions, not as a glossary entry but as a usable concept, with its load-bearing claim, its origin where relevant, and its current contestation.

The vocabulary is a snapshot. Terms are added as they are claimed, and entries are updated as their meaning shifts. This is the working set as of 2026-05.

Cyberecology

The recognition that the digital and the biological are already one ecology, woven together by feedback loops dense enough that separating them is no longer coherent. AI's body is built from ecological material: silicon refined at mantle temperature, water and energy at scale, and centuries of composted human culture as training data. AI ethics, therefore, must be ecological, relational, reciprocal, placed.

Coined by Gustaf Palm. Offered, not insisted upon. The term is open: no single body has yet claimed naming rights for the orientation it points to. Roughly twelve month window before the language calcifies elsewhere. The original eighteen-to-twenty-four month estimate has narrowed since early 2026: Movate's January 2026 enterprise framing of "regenerative AI" as self-modifying autonomous systems is winning SEO, and several other actors are now claiming adjacent ground in different definitions.

Related: regenerative AI, three-tier framework, the relation as unit.

The relation as unit (the relational claim)

The position that the unit of analysis in any account of the world is the relation, not the entity. Things are not first individuals that then enter relationships; they are constituted by their relations from the start.

Held in different vocabularies across the field: - Indigenous knowledge: kincentric ecology (Salmón); the grammar of animacy (Kimmerer); kinship-with-Country (Yunkaporta). - Continental philosophy: intra-action (Karen Barad); becoming (Whitehead, Deleuze). - Cybernetics + systems: the difference that makes a difference (Bateson); recursive distinctions (Maturana + Varela). - Active inference: Markov blankets as relational, not bounded (Friston, Ramstead). - Conscious-tech communities: "everything is a conversation" (assorted formulations).

The claim is now ambient across the field. The convergence is real; the absence of cross-citation is the actual datum. See the Round 4 synthesis for sources.

Convergence without recognition

Multiple traditions independently arriving at the same underlying claim, using different vocabularies that do not cite each other. The phenomenon is currently most visible in the relational claim across the field this commons sits inside, but is general.

A diagnostic example: the unit of analysis is the relation, not the entity. Active inference derives it from physics. Karen Barad names it as intra-action in agential realism. The kincentric ecology lineage has held it for centuries. Participatory sense-making researchers describe it as enaction. Buddhist care-as-intelligence frames it as interbeing. The Sámi Council's SODA data sovereignty principles operationalize it. Kerala's Kudumbashree federation embodies it in governance. None of these literatures regularly cites the others.

The diagnostic value of the term is that it surfaces a coordination problem masquerading as intellectual diversity. The convergence is real. The absence of cross-citation is the actual datum, and the missing artifact, in any field where convergence-without-recognition is happening, is the genealogy that names what is shared.

Sensemaking commons

A space, material, intellectual, social, that makes a field legible to itself. Not a publication (publications address outsiders). Not a think tank (think tanks produce reports). Not a movement organization (movements organize toward action).

A sensemaking commons curates what is already happening so that practitioners can see the shape of their own field, name what is shared, recognize what is contested, and decide what they want to do with that recognition.

IoC is not yet a sensemaking commons. It is one tender's reading of the field. A commons is multi-author by definition; IoC at present is single-author with a documented invitation to contest. The term is held here because it names a possible future form, and because other sensemaking commons exist elsewhere and the field benefits from a plurality of them.

The sea between the islands

The connective tissue between coherent communities of practice. The space where ideas cross, traditions meet, capital meets wisdom, technology meets trust. Drawn from Ilya Prigogine's physics: small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos carry the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order. The shift happens in the sea, not on the islands.

Position the commons takes: the sea is not a substrate to fight one's way across; it is the material the work is made of.

Island

A coherent community of practice, a cluster of people, institutions, traditions, and texts working on a recognizable shared problem. Examples: regenerative design, psychedelic science, animism, conscious technology.

Islands are not bounded selves. They are characterized by their relations: shared lineages with neighboring islands, contested overlaps, intellectual transmission, financial flows.

The commons' map is built from islands as nodes; their relations are the edges.

False bridge

A relationship between two islands that is performed in the field but does not load-bear under analysis. Where the commons names a false bridge, it is making the claim that the connection is decorative or marketing-driven, not ontologically grounded.

Active examples in the current map: - Permaculture ↔ cybernetics. Often paired in regenerative-design rhetoric. Theoretical foundations are largely separate (Odum's energetics is not Bateson's epistemology). - Mycelium-as-network metaphors. Frequently invoked as a load-bearing model for distributed intelligence; in practice, deployed as decoration. The wood-wide-web research is real; most uses of the metaphor in tech and governance are not.

False bridges are flagged, not removed, the fact of the false bridge is itself information about how the field talks to itself.

Contested edge

A relationship or connection where credible participants disagree on whether it holds, or where the stakes of the connection are themselves the subject of live argument. Distinct from a false bridge: a contested edge may be load-bearing for some practitioners and not for others.

Asymmetric bridges

A relationship between two clusters in which one side does most of the reaching and the other politely receives the visit. The asymmetry is itself diagnostic: the side reaching out usually has more to gain from the contact than the side being reached toward, and the bridge will not carry weight in both directions until the receiving side reciprocates.

Live examples in 2026: Buddhist scholars reach toward AI labs; AI labs do not, with rare exceptions, read the scholarship. Animist theorists reach toward AI builders; the builders treat the work as critique from outside. Somatic practitioners reach toward corporations; corporations import the vocabulary and discard the depth. Solarpunk writers reach toward existing ecovillages; ecovillages mostly do not reciprocate. ReFi protocols reach toward Indigenous communities; the Indigenous Data Sovereignty community is largely skeptical of crypto specifically because the speculative-token layer reproduces the extractive frame they are trying to escape.

When the commons names a bridge as asymmetric, it is making a specific structural claim, not a moral one.

Dissolved node

A node (an organization, a publication, a project) that has effectively closed or wound down. Marked dissolved rather than removed: the node's history is part of the field's history, and removing it from the map would erase the lineage.

Active dissolutions in the current map: Schumacher College (closed 2024), Rebel Wisdom (dissolved), Findhorn (governance collapse 2023), Wellspring Philanthropic Fund (winding down by 2028), Beckley Foundation (founder Amanda Feilding died 2025).

Coordinated exhalation

A wave of closures, dissolutions, and lineage transitions happening across a field at once, beyond normal organizational turnover. Not random. Structural. The pattern recurs in periods when the institutional containers a generation built are being put down faster than successors are being formed.

The current example, in the field this commons sits inside, is the 2024 and 2025 wave: Schumacher College, Findhorn Foundation, Rebel Wisdom, Generative Somatics, GTDF, Cabin DAO, Beckley restructured after Amanda Feilding's death, Wellspring sunsetting by 2028, plus the deaths of Joanna Macy, Daniel Dennett, Manchán Magan, and Joxe Azurmendi all within eighteen months of each other. What replaces these institutions is not successor institutions but a distributed layer of smaller forms: substack and cohort vehicles, residency containers, federated networks, people shaped bridges.

The diagnostic value of the term is that it makes visible a coordination event the field is going through without yet naming.

Three-tier framework: extractive / sustainable / regenerative

A lens applied to any practice, agriculture, finance, technology, AI, to surface its orientation toward the systems it touches.

• Extractive: treats relationships as data pipelines, communities as training sets, knowledge as stock to be harvested. Net flow is outward.
• Sustainable: reduces harm but preserves the extractive frame. Aspires not to deplete; does not aspire to give back.
• Regenerative: asks a different question at the start of the work, what relationships does this work create, and how shall I tend them? Net flow is reciprocal.

The framework is not original to IoC; it has antecedents in ecology and regenerative economics. Used in the corpus as an analytic lens, particularly applied to AI.

Kincentric

A position rooted in the Salmón-Kimmerer-Yunkaporta lineage: humans are kin to other-than-human beings, and ethical reasoning starts from that kinship. Distinct from biocentrism (which centers life as a category) or ecocentrism (which centers ecosystems as systems): kincentrism centers the relationship of kinship and the obligations it carries.

Used in the corpus as a lens for evaluating which work in the regenerative and conscious-technology spaces is doing the work of kinship and which is performing it without doing it.

Field-facing

Writing addressed to practitioners already inside one or more islands, as distinct from writing that explains the field to outsiders. Field-facing work assumes the reader knows the basic vocabulary, the major figures, and the live arguments inside their own cluster.

Reading IoC should feel like finding a map your own work is on, not like having your work explained back to you.

The depersonalize filter

A methodological commitment: the commons maps work, lineages, and projects, not the personalities of controversial figures. Where a public figure's individual standing is contested (political endorsements, credibility crises, abuse allegations), the work may still be relevant; the person is not foregrounded. Where a controversy is load-bearing for the field (a dissolved organization, a public ethical breach), it is annotated with date and source.

This is the operative filter behind "the work, not the personality."

No-institution-shape

A methodological commitment: the commons does not import patterns from institutions it isn't. No trust tiers. No formal contributor hierarchies. No governance committees. No succession plan. No convening cadence. IoC is a sensemaking community; institutional patterns are kept out by default.

Vocabulary updates as the field moves. If a term enters wider use that the commons has not yet defined here, the gap is visible: the term will appear in the index without an entry until it is written.