What begins as an act of response—a mutation, a thought, a tool—is not designed to last. It emerges, briefly optimal in a changing landscape, then fades or fragments. But sometimes, the solution doesn’t end when the problem is gone. Sometimes the solution learns to survive. It begins to reinforce itself, not because it’s still needed, but because it can. Biology calls this replication. Sociology calls it institutionalisation. In logic, it’s the point at which a function begins to return itself as its output.
This tendency is everywhere. In cells, in cities, in code. A nervous system doesn’t just react—it begins to model. And that model becomes the new environment. A university isn’t just a place to ask questions—it becomes a place to perform the act of questioning, until the performance matters more than the question. The symbol becomes recursive. The act becomes the artefact. This is entropy’s little trick: not just disorder, but the freezing of flexibility into form.
Take the university system. Once a hub for the generative turbulence of new knowledge, it now primarily manages its own continuity. It rewards repetition masquerading as rigor. It privileges sanctioned novelty over actual risk. It writes rules for thought, then grants degrees in obeying them. The School of Cybernetics at ANU markets itself as a cutting edge. But the edge is dull by design. The innovation is a curated theatre. The language is agile, but the logic is inertial. AI ethics, systems thinking, transdisciplinarity—each becomes a branded loop that cycles meaninglessly unless pointed back at the institution itself, which it never is.
There’s a thermodynamic metaphor here. Dissipative systems, like hurricanes or living cells, require a constant flow of energy to maintain their structure. Once the flow is interrupted, they collapse or calcify. But institutions have learned a different trick: how to simulate flow internally, recycling the appearance of motion without moving. The result is an internal loop of symbolic energy—publication, citation, policy draft, grant application. These are not outputs; they are by-products of self-replication. The system survives by feeding on its own exhaust.
In cybernetics, this is the second-order trap. A system monitors not the world, but its model of the world. Feedback tightens, and soon, adaptation is no longer directed outward but inward—adjusting how the system feels about itself. This isn’t intelligence. It’s solipsism. The same occurs in bureaucracies, economies, academic disciplines. The signals that once signified relevance now signify only survival. The environment has changed, but the system responds only to the echo of its own voice.
And yet we’re told this is progress. That these institutions are centres of thought, drivers of discovery. But look closely and you’ll see the same gesture, again and again: perform innovation, but never let it endanger the machinery. What they fear isn’t failure—it’s difference. Real difference destabilises. Real thinking breaks the loop. That’s the point. That’s why it doesn’t happen here.
Daedelus Kite 