Regulation of social media is sold as public hygiene but functions more like selective pruning in a forest that no one understands. Bureaucracies and their corporate partners operate under a control logic shaped by short-term optics rather than systemic insight. In Australia, as elsewhere, the expertise required to manage such vast, self-amplifying communication networks barely exists inside the institutions trying to regulate them. What they do have—hierarchies, compliance cultures, transactional incentives—pushes them toward eliminating uncertainty rather than cultivating resilience. Yet these platforms thrive on variance; their value emerges precisely from the unpredictable, the outlier signal that nobody saw coming. The regulatory reflex to starve that signal may feel prudent, but it hollows the system it aims to stabilise.
In this sense, the regulation of digital communication resembles an autoimmune disorder. It attacks the very novelty it depends upon, mistaking weak signals for pathogens. Disinformation is real, but the blunt instruments used to suppress it sweep up emergent intelligence as collateral damage. The result is a brittle, risk-averse discourse that mirrors the bureaucracies shaping it: efficient at suppressing noise, incapable of recognising nascent value. Economists can argue that life reduces to transactions, but that model collapses at the cosmic scale, where diversity—not uniformity—is the ground state. Social media regulation that cannot internalise this paradox will continue to protect the present at the expense of the future, pruning away the mutations that keep the forest alive.
Daedelus Kite 