AlterNef: the Ship of Alternatives. From the French nef, meaning ship.
🌬️ Welcome Aboard
This is a digital garden, not a blog (though it contains one). Notes here are seeds at various stages of growth. Some are well-rooted arguments. Others are half-formed intuitions waiting for the right connection. The garden evolves as I do.
I’m Sacha Pignot (Soushi888), a developer and mystique-technologue based in Montreal. I build peer-to-peer infrastructure on Holochain for communities that want to coordinate without centralized gatekeepers. My technical work sits at the intersection of the semantic web, distributed computing, and commons-based economics. My contemplative practice (meditation, Qi Gong, Western esoteric traditions) informs the why behind the architecture.
The AlterNef is the vessel that carries all of this. The name encodes a conviction: alternatives are not luxuries. They are necessities. The right to think differently, to organize differently, to build systems that encode different assumptions about power, ownership, and trust, this is the thread running through every note in this garden.
Whether you’re here to observe, contribute, or simply wander between ideas, you’re welcome aboard.
🌍 The Canopy of Knowledge
The garden is organized around seven branches of inquiry. Together they map the territory any community serious about self-governance must eventually navigate.
🌱 Land and Nature Stewardship
Regenerative ecosystems, sustainable land use, and deep ecological thinking.
🏙️ Built Environment
Resilient architecture, urban transformation, and nature-integrated design.
🛠️ Tools and Technology
Decentralized infrastructure, agent-centric computing, and the tools that shape human agency.
🌍 Culture and Education
Non-linear learning, open knowledge systems, and cultural evolution beyond institutional models.
🌈 Health and Wellbeing
Holistic health, mind-body integration, and somatic and energetic practices.
💰 Finance and Economics
Post-capitalist coordination, mutual credit, ValueFlows, and alternative value exchange.
🤝 Governance and Community
Distributed networks, fractal sovereignty, and participatory governance from household to bioregional scale.
🌬️ Principles of Flight
Interconnection. Ideas link to each other because knowledge is not hierarchical. A note on Qi Gong may connect to one on distributed systems, and the connection is not decorative.
Thinking in public. These notes are not polished essays. Publishing incomplete thoughts invites the kind of feedback that accelerates understanding.
The Right to Alternative. Exploring unconventional approaches to technology, economics, governance, and inner life is not a hobby. It is foundational work for what comes next.
🌟 Entry Points
🧑🚀 About the Navigator
Who I am, how I got here, and what drives the work.
📝 Blog
Longer-form writing, research, and experiments.
🛠️ Portfolio
The technical projects: Nondominium, Requests & Offers, and the Holochain infrastructure work.
Or simply follow the links between notes. That is how a garden is meant to be explored.
🪄 Bon voyage