Populism

What we are dealing with is not primarily a moral or semantic crisis, even though it is experienced that way. Planetary-scale communication systems behave like physical systems with dense feedback and high throughput: they develop statistical biases toward states that reproduce the conditions of their own continuation. These systems have ontic reality—that is, they are real, causal, dynamic entities in their own right, not mere metaphors. A bushfire, for example, does not “want” to spread, yet it is a real process driven by gradients of difference: energy, temperature, fuel density, and available pathways for propagation. Global communication behaves the same way. Outrage, simplification, polarisation, and volatility persist because they are structurally effective at sustaining circulation at scale. Moral language, meaning, and ethical judgement are real human experiences, but they are downstream expressions of systemic dynamics, not their cause. Language itself carries bias because it is a finite, constraint-governed system continuous with logic, computation, and physics. Treating contemporary instability as a failure of values or discourse mistakes surface effects for mechanisms. To engage this intelligently, we must work at the level where selection actually occurs—speed, coupling, amplification, and statistical pressure—because that is how complex systems behave.