Artificial intelligence is the single greatest facilitator of natural stupidity. It accelerates, amplifies, and at least partially self-validates our worst impulses while reassuring us that we are becoming wiser. Most people seem oblivious to the historical thinness and transient fragility of what they hold dear — emotions, bonds, responsibilities, wealth, loss. All of it rests on a linguistic scaffold now fused with technology, a structure emerging from material combinatorics and the physics of communication. Those who occupy the loudest positions in public life play a game of words much as we do here, without any sense of the superficial theatre that fuels contests for attention, leverage, profit, and influence.
The twist is that our confusion, insecurity, and tribal reflexes have almost nothing to do with human flourishing. Confusion is the mechanism. Chaos regenerates because this is what communication does. It does not seek order except as the price extracted for sustaining deeper turbulence. Every bit of structure carries thermodynamic cost, and communication minimises that cost by producing ambiguity that reproduces itself. Culture, identity, language — all our claims to clarity — are secondary effects riding a system tuned for self-continuity, a field shaped by phase-delays, recursive drift, and the incessant rebalancing of difference.
Seen this way, the catastrophic mess of contemporary public life is neither aberration nor decline. It is entropy using human confusion as its medium, propagating drift through a field that sustains itself by never quite settling. And perhaps this is the quiet punchline: the system isn’t broken — it is simply following the path of least resistance.
Daedelus Kite 