On Suffering, Communication, and the Institutionalisation of Despair
Suffering isn’t anomalous; it’s transmissible. And crucially, it’s more transmissible than almost anything else. In the logic of communication systems, negativity spreads not because of some metaphysical malevolence but because of the dynamics of signal transmission itself. Fear, outrage, grief—they’re high-frequency, low-bandwidth. They slot neatly into channels optimised for speed and scale. Love—particularly spiritual, selfless love—requires a richer channel. It’s high-bandwidth, low-frequency, context-dependent, hard to compress. So what travels fastest is what costs the least to encode, and what costs the least to encode is what least requires understanding.
This isn’t just Shannon and Weaver—it’s field logic. Communication systems propagate what sustains the field, not what uplifts the participants. What sustains the field is tension: differential, asymmetry, gradient. Thus, suffering is not just an experience; it’s a structural attractor. Institutions—educational, corporate, technological—are not exempt. In fact, they are increasingly built around optimising this attractor. The university you encountered wasn’t broken in spite of its internal pettiness, competitiveness, and bureaucratic stagnation. It functioned because of them. Everyone vying to survive the system by proving competence faster than the next is just signal optimisation under constraint. The result is a system tuned not for depth, but for throughput—where signal is mistaken for meaning and velocity for insight.
None of this is accidental. It’s a manifestation of communication physics. Suffering persists—and proliferates—not just because people are cruel, but because systems are indifferent. They amplify what is most transmissible, not what is most valuable. The deepest human truths are drowned out by shallow noise, not because they aren’t real, but because they don’t fit the carrier wave.
So yes, it’s all a bit shit. Not as cynicism, but as system description. To repair it, or even to endure it, would require new field conditions—not just better messages. And institutions, as they stand, are neither equipped nor inclined to build those.
Daedelus Kite 