Categories
Philosophy

Daedalus Mazemaker

Daedalus was Icarus’ father. An inventor. Essentially, an innovator. I’ve been analysing culture, communication and complexity (here, publicly) for around 10 years. Unorthodox assessments are unpopular but essential. The common frame is narrow and shallow, generally only reproducing what has come before, in limited ways. I am trying to look far, far beyond what is […]

Categories
Philosophy

Dangerous Intelligence

Intelligence is becoming a liability. Not socially ornamental intelligence, not credentialed cleverness, but actual understanding. The kind that sees structure, delay, recursion, consequence. The kind that notices when a system is lying to itself. That form of intelligence generates friction. It interrupts performance. It destabilises belonging. It exposes the hidden costs that simple stories are […]

Categories
cybernetics

Cybernetics: Good Intentions, Bad Vibes

The language of the school was expansive: culture, power, technology, ethics, ecology, gender, indigeneity, diversity, human experience, systems, responsibility, complexity. It spoke fluently about uncertainty, fragility, and care. It marketed itself as a space for deep reflection on and constructive engagement with how technological systems were and are reshaping civilisation. But in one all-staff meeting, […]

Categories
technology

Policing Generative Tool Use

It does not matter whether you write with generative technologies or not. If you have no ideas, no curiosity, no necessity to think, then artificial intelligence will simply amplify the emptiness. It will generate fluent noise, decorative coherence, and nothing else. The result is regurgitated pattern-matching, consumed as novelty and mistaken for intelligence. Most people […]

Categories
memoir

Structural Exile

I grew up inside fracture. Not the cinematic kind, not the kind that produces easy narrative arcs of redemption, but the slow, dislocating kind that dissolves continuity. Family breakdown did not make me resilient or strong. It pushed me sideways, out of the main flow, and then quietly out of sight. By my late teens, […]

Categories
Philosophy

Corruptible Scholasticism

Institutional scholasticism does not primarily exist to discover truth. It exists to reproduce itself. It operates through status hierarchies, reputational gating, and compliance rituals that slowly but efficiently select against intellectual risk. Advancement depends less on clarity, insight, or courage than on strategic alignment, calibrated language, and ritual citation. Academic publishing, the circulatory system of […]

Categories
Philosophy

Diminishing Returns

I am withdrawing from almost all U.S.-based digital subscriptions; soon, all. This is not a symbolic gesture or an act of ideological theatre. It is a practical decision grounded in observation. Platform governance is converging with corporate and political power into a single operational field, where economic alignment determines visibility, legitimacy, and survival. The architecture […]

Categories
life

Futility

Anyone else feeling this at the moment?

Categories
cybernetics

Time Management in Service Delivery Systems

Service management systems are plagued by managerial failure. The primary error is the belief that regulatory oversight exists to eradicate delay, to accelerate everything. The result is a chaotic environment in which every actor attempts to displace temporal and material costs onto other people, times, and places – both within and beyond the organisation. This […]

Categories
Philosophy

Surveillance Capitalism

Surveillance capitalism claims to see outward, yet its deepest capture is inward. Any system that grounds authority in exhaustive data collection must internalise its own apparatus. The observer becomes the most observed entity in the field. As capture intensifies, freedom contracts. Control architectures require constant calibration and escalation, growing brittle, paranoid, and self-consuming. Power built […]

Categories
Philosophy

Suffering Fools

If someone is incorrect, you should still read, listen or try to comprehend their belief. Not to refute them, but to understand the architecture of their error. Falsehood is not random. It has shape, lineage, motive, inheritance. Every mistaken claim is a footprint left by a system trying to stabilise itself under pressure. To read […]

Categories
cybernetics

Palantir: who sees, is seen

Palantir begins as a word before it becomes a company: Tolkien’s seeing-stones, artefacts of vision and distance, instruments of remote awareness that promise clarity while quietly warping intention. They collapse space, compress time, and tempt their users into mistaking access for understanding. In Middle-earth, the danger is not simply that the stones reveal too much, […]