Dee Neely

Dee Neely
Caycee Dee Neely; Cacyee Dee Neely; Cayce Neely
Born	1964-07-13 Tuscaloosa, Alabama
Died	2025-11-05 Kingsport, Tennessee
Occupation	programmer, CAD designer, journalist, space settlement advocate
Partner	Winnie Neely

Dee Neely

Dee Neely ((1964-07-13)13 July 1964 – 5 November 2025(2025-11-05) (aged 61)), who also wrote as Caycee Dee Neely and Cayce Neely, was an American programmer, CAD designer, local journalist and space settlement advocate. Neely was a long-standing member of the Living Universe Foundation (LUF), served as its Open Knowledge Correspondent, and was the author of the space-settlement philosophy they called Elevationism.

Early life and education

• Born 13 July 1964 in Tuscaloosa.
• Moved to Tennessee in 1993.
• Studied martial arts from high school onward.
• Graduated with a BA from Northeast State University.
• Held an associate degree in computer science, and by 2019 was, in Neely's own description, "almost done with a Bachelors in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics" from Southern New Hampshire University.

Neely lived in Knoxville from 2011, and moved to Kingsport in 2013.

Blogging and journalism

Neely began the blog My Visions — subtitled "A mix of personal changes and important ideas" — at cayceedeesuniverse.wordpress.com on 19 July 2010, opening it with a statement of intent:

I have started this blog as part of my creation of a new web identity. This will chronicle my changes in multiple aspects of my life as they happen and will help specify the projects I think are worthy of my time. First, let me say that I am who I am. If you don't like who I am then don't read the posts and certainly don't make asinine comments. I am in a process of becoming something new so don't be surprised at what you find here.

— Dee Neely, "First Blog Post", 19 July 2010

The blog ran to some seventy-nine posts between 2010 and 2021, mixing space-settlement engineering, environmental and political commentary, atheism, and a candid personal diary.

From 2011 to 2012 Neely wrote for Examiner.com as the Knoxville Green Activism Examiner and the Knoxville Liberal Examiner, filing on mountaintop removal, coal slurry discharges, Knoxville air quality, the Tennessee Valley Authority–EPA settlement, the city's recycling programme, Occupy Wall Street in Knoxville, and Tennessee state politics. Neely described the position as a dream job: "I have a writing position at the National Level with Examiner.com. I will be covering space news and happenings which is a dream job. Space and space exploration was my first love."

Living Universe Foundation

Neely read Marshall T. Savage's The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps around 2001 and went looking for the organisation behind it, which is how the connection to the Living Universe Foundation began. Alongside Savage's book, Neely credited Star Trek as the founding influence: "The principles of egalitarianism, tolerance, and science promoted by Gene Roddenberry provided a firm foundation for my entire life's philosophy."

By the early 2010s the LUF survived mainly as a Yahoo! Groups discussion list, luf-team, which accumulated a few hundred messages before Yahoo's changes and the group's own decline killed it around September 2013. According to Keith Dauzat, who took part in the list, Neely registered the domain and administered the forum; Dauzat estimated the whole run of the forum at perhaps two hundred messages, and recalled that his own recurring theme there — that LUF members should pursue financial independence in order to bootstrap the project — never gained traction.

A recurring thread on the list was the question of what had become of Savage himself, who had withdrawn from public life; Neely raised it repeatedly, under a succession of different names, and no satisfactory answer was ever given. Neely's own account of those repeat appearances was straightforward: "I have checked in to the group several times under different names as I went through my own transformations."

Neely broke publicly with the LUF on 6 March 2011, in a post announcing a move to The Zeitgeist Movement:

However, my first foray into the LUF ended as I ran into the wall of can't which seems to poison the group on a constant basis. […] I have recently completed reading the entire group archive of messages. The problem is that the group never made the jump into a movement. They tried the same old money-centric corporate system which has led us where we are today. We simply can't colonize space if we keep to the old ways of doing things. […] I apologize to the friends I have made in the LUF but its just the truth as I see it. Time to let go and time to move on.

— Dee Neely, "Living Universe to Zeitgeist Movement", 6 March 2011

The break did not hold. By November 2013 Neely was writing that "the major group I am involved with is the Living Universe Foundation", and had begun an Open Source Habitation Database intended to map the interlocking technologies a settlement would need; the post set out a hierarchy of energy storage, solar photovoltaic and thermal, environmental, nuclear and biofuel generation for colonies "everywhere from the oceans to the asteroids and beyond", and argued that space settlement should abandon the terrestrial reliance on alternating current.

In September 2019 Neely returned to the LUF as its Open Knowledge Correspondent on the foundation's revived collective blog, contributing three articles.

Open Knowledge

Neely's LUF work argued that open knowledge is a precondition of space settlement, defining it as "the principle that innovation and expansion work best when the knowledge about how is available to all" and dividing it into six domains: open source software, open source hardware, Open science, Open data, open culture and Open government. The rationale for settlement was practical rather than ideological: an isolated community must be able to repair and improve its own equipment rather than depend on a distant corporate supplier.

A second article catalogued existing open-source practice in spaceflight — the International Space Station's migration to Debian after a malware infection, the Hewlett Packard Enterprise Linux supercomputer installed aboard in 2017, SpaceX's use of Linux across the Falcon, Dragon and Grasshopper vehicles and its ground stations, and open hardware projects including SkyCube, ArduSat and NASA's Open Source Rover — and proposed that the LUF could coordinate such projects and pioneer applications in habitat design and environmental control.

The third took up academic publishing, criticising Elsevier, Springer and Hindawi as gatekeepers, citing the initial rejection of the Graphene work of Novoselov and colleagues in 2004 as a case of impact-driven editorial judgement delaying a Nobel-winning result, and noting the University of California's March 2019 decision to break off negotiations with Elsevier.

Elevationism

Neely first proposed Elevationism on 14 November 2013, positing "a very real need for the development of a society based on the principles of reason, science, atheism, humanism and democracy" that would withdraw from the wider world rather than attempt to convert it: "Instead of trying to raise the rest of humanity up perhaps we should leave them to their path and open ourselves up only to those who wish to be a part of us."

A fuller statement followed on 26 March 2021. Its mission statement held that expansion into space was necessary for survival but required "new mindsets and capabilities", by three interrelated methods: mutualist social and technological practice, augmentation of human physical, intellectual and emotional capacity, and the assistive technologies to support that augmentation — technologies Neely argued would apply equally to global warming, pollution, energy use and human conflict on Earth.

The accompanying organisational principles committed an Elevationist society to the scientific method; to humanist values including Negative utilitarianism and Distributive justice; to Direct democracy with a vote for every sentient member; to secular governance; to non-belligerence, with force used only defensively; to Cradle-to-cradle design; to cooperative economics under democratic member control; to Morphological freedom and phenotypic freedom; and to open knowledge under Creative Commons licensing. The first principle was a code of conduct: "Membership in the society shall be a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of age, body size, disability, ethnicity, sex characteristics, gender identity and expression, level of experience, education, socioeconomic status, nationality, personal appearance, race, religion, level of technological modification, technological identity, or sexual identity and orientation."

Neely also registered earthsettlementone.com, a project site now defunct.

Name and identity

The shifting bylines that made Neely hard to trace online are documented in Neely's own writing. Neely came out as transgender in February 2011, and declared 24 April 2011 "the Official Switch To Dee Day": "I have given people over a month to get used to calling me something else. So far, only two to three people have done so. Thank you Winnie, Stormy and Melanie." Later work appeared variously as Dee Neely, Caycee Dee Neely, Cacyee Dee Neely and Cayce Neely.

The blog also records the transition stalling after the move to Kingsport in 2013, which Neely attributed to a lack of privacy at home, the loss of TennCare coverage and access to counselling, a suspended driver's licence, and a regional bus service too limited to reach the nearest support group in Johnson City. Neely's obituary uses they/them pronouns throughout.

Family

• Married Winnie Neely; the couple marked their sixteenth anniversary on 9 February 2025.

Survived by:

• their wife Winnie Neely
• son Stefan Neely
• daughter Kerowyn Neely and her mother Kathy Ashby
• step-son Tyler Ashby
• step-daughter Kyra Vautrin-Davis and her partner Zach Upchurch, with their children
• step-daughter Ayla Gregory and her spouse EJ Gregory
• step-son Richard Vautrin-Hickam
• sister-in-law Jen Vautrin
• father-in-law Richard Vautrin

Death

• Died 5 November 2025 at home in Kingsport, aged 61, after metastatic brain cancer.
• A gathering of remembrance was held at the family residence.

External links

Most of these are now dead; they are recorded here because the material they held is largely unrecoverable.

• Author archive at the Living Universe Foundation
• My Visions blog
• @cayceedeeneely on Twitter
• earthsettlementone.com
• luf-team Yahoo Group
• Obituary at Ever Loved