I am endlessly fascinated by the many ways that these systems of knowledge and information or culture and political momentum tend towards similar, recurring self-organisational and behavioural patterns.
Much is (rightly) made of a contemporary, pronounced turn towards populism and authoritarianism. A suggestion for interpretation which does not seek to directly engage any specific instance of culture, ideology or power is that there is some kind of internal necessity in the large-scale (i.e. holistic) information and energy gradients of mega-social systems that leads them into these oscillating periods of cognitive or conceptual contraction and subsequent decompression or openness.
Acknowledging that such wistful navel-gazing and rhetorical hyperbole is insufficient assistance to providing immediate counters or engagement strategies, it is still of interest to know that what are very often driven and asserted as ideological necessities or inevitabilities from within any political framework are just as likely the ebb and flow of underlying, undirected and entirely autonomous patterns of blind computation.
Without deeply and profoundly understanding a problem, there is absolutely no way of negotiating it without inadvertently and eventually recreating it.
Daedelus Kite 