Across the United States, and increasingly across comparable political systems, authoritarian grift has consolidated with remarkable speed. It is disproportionately financed, protected, and normalised by extreme concentrations of wealth. The alignment is not driven by ideological sophistication, intelligence, or long-term strategy. It is driven by extraction. Ultra-rich actors pursue deregulation, tax minimisation, labour suppression, and narrative insulation, mistaking short-term buffering for durability. In the process, they hollow out the institutional, legal, and cultural structures that produced their symbolic and material capital. This pattern is historically persistent yet critically unstable. Fascist and adjacent formations reliably consume the conditions of their own possibility. They convert governance into spectacle, legitimacy into loyalty theatre, and continuity into enforcement. Instability follows, which is then misread as proof that even greater control is required. What presents as deliberate domination is more accurately described as unconscious recursion: control generates the anxiety that appears to justify further control.
At the level of the communicative system, this is not merely political failure. It is a phase transition in an overloaded symbolic network. When meaning throughput exceeds a system’s capacity to integrate delay, verification, and contradiction, the network sheds nuance in favour of velocity. A periodic tidal surge of reductive cognition emerges, not as cultural accident but as crude self-modulation under constraint. Symbols simplify. Emotional salience outcompetes coherence. Repetition replaces understanding. Authoritarian grift thrives under these conditions because it is efficient, not because it is true. Intelligence, artificial or otherwise, is largely irrelevant. What is being selected is signal propagation under constraint. As carrying capacity fractures, amplification replaces sense-making. Complexity is displaced rather than resolved, allowing the system to stabilise locally while degrading globally. What looks like mass irrationality is better understood as the statistical mechanics of communicatively self-entangled adaptive systems under strain, mistaking acceleration for strength while eroding their own foundations.
Daedelus Kite 