The soup de jour is disinformation: I found myself watching the movie World War Z (again) recently. The biological plausibility of a zombie virus that can detect and avoid sickness as a critical vulnerability and plot twist wasn’t quite enough to render the movie as being anything significantly other than “Brad Pitt saves the world, again”.
Notwithstanding that brief foray into film criticism, it is worth considering the notion that there can be, and often is, a potentially critical vulnerability in a biological (or technological) system, and that this susceptibility is a consequence of recursive insights into the structure and flow of that system.
When thinking about how best (or at least better) to engage a rising tide of political deception, questions as to usefully critical vulnerability arise on both sides of this disinformation equation. That is – while the pluralist diversity of democratic complexity is endemically receptive (as vulnerable) to the ingestion of targeted deception, it is possible that a signal of vulnerability, like Janus, “looks both ways”.
A sustainable autocracy appears critically dependent on offsetting internal structural entropy to its environment, aka everyone and everything else in the world. Internal political leverage (as repression) is maintained at an organisational cost of vandalising external elections, infrastructure, social institutions, etc. While the specifics are themselves complex, the central point here is that an adversarial dependency upon seeding and amplifying entropy is quite probably itself a critical vulnerability, if only we might find the right way to define, design and deploy interdictions upon it.
Daedelus Kite 