The language of the school was expansive: culture, power, technology, ethics, ecology, gender, indigeneity, diversity, human experience, systems, responsibility, complexity. It spoke fluently about uncertainty, fragility, and care. It marketed itself as a space for deep reflection on and constructive engagement with how technological systems were and are reshaping civilisation. But in one all-staff meeting, which I attended not as an employee but as a scholarship-funded PhD student, I asked whether any of this was being done for reasons other than shits and giggles.
The room fell silent.
Not disagreement. Not debate. Silence. Eventually, a member of the executive said something about not taking things personally. That was all. It was a strange response, given that the school’s central narrative revolved around the primacy of culture and human experience. When an actual human experience disrupted the performance, it was quietly neutralised. That moment revealed more about the system than any strategic plan or mission statement ever could.
I had entered the PhD after completing a master’s degree in 2022. A week after leaving my job, about a month before I was meant to start, I suffered two strokes. I delayed commencement but did not walk away. I did not want to give up the opportunity to derive something of value from cybernetics, not for myself, but because what it gestures toward matters far beyond any single institution or career. For a time, I lost the ability to read and much of my vision. I had to relearn how to recognise words, even while knowing what they meant. Returning to study under those conditions was difficult, slow, and demanding, but I did it. What surprised me most was that the greatest barrier I faced was not neurological. It was institutional. Not just the school, but the university, and beyond that, the broader institutional culture in Australia. At each layer, the same logic reappeared: dominance, hierarchy, risk aversion, reputational self-protection, bureaucratic inertia. What I encountered inside the school was a compressed version of what we are all now living inside.
From that point on, a pattern became impossible to ignore. The school spoke fluently about complexity while systematically suppressing it. It celebrated critique in theory while disciplining it in practice. It valorised plurality while enforcing ideological coherence. And it became so absorbed in playing the game of being a school inside an institution — which I understand as the metabolic requirement of organisational continuity — that it lost the capacity, not necessarily the aptitude, but the capacity, to act consequentially on any of the issues it claimed to identify. It could name problems. It could narrate them. It could perform concern. But it could not structurally intervene. The machinery of institutional continuity consumed the agency required for meaningful change.
This is not a story about bad people. It is a story about systemic gravity.
I study language and communication as living systems: metabolic machines that convert uncertainty into legitimacy, attention, funding, and authority. Institutions do not merely produce knowledge. They metabolise doubt. Uncertainty renders journals necessary, careers defensible, conferences viable, grants urgent. Complexity becomes theatre. Obscurity becomes status. Ambiguity becomes infrastructure. Confusion is not a flaw. It is the operating condition. Inside such systems, critique becomes content, dissent becomes legitimacy, and opposition becomes structural reinforcement. Power does not collapse under resistance. It feeds on it.
This is why adversarial politics does not destabilise power. It stabilises it.
Opposition supplies contrast. Contrast generates identity. Identity sustains motion. The system feeds on its own antitheses. Resistance becomes circulation. Critique becomes legitimacy. Institutions come to believe they are resisting power while reproducing the logic that sustains it. The axis does not shift. Only orientation changes. Inversion is mistaken for transformation. Moral urgency amplifies throughput. Rhetorical escalation accelerates circulation. Ideological turbulence sustains relevance.
The deeper mistake sits at the level of political logic. Gender, indigeneity, culture, identity, ecology: these are not problems to be solved through capture, assertion, or institutional conquest. They are relational fields shaped by history, trauma, power, language, and context. The moment they are treated as territories to be claimed or administered, the logic of domination reappears in inverted form. Power does not vanish when reversed. It rotates.
Many staff understood what cybernetics was pointing toward: recursive power, feedback, control, unintended consequence, systemic blindness. Others were pulled into institutional gravity: funding cycles, reputational risk, bureaucratic survival, political pressure. Many had little choice. Structural penalties shape behaviour. The outcome was predictable. Critique narrowed. Conformity expanded. Complexity flattened.
The absence of courage was real, but it was not moral. It was structural. To perceive one’s own entanglement inside power requires risking identity, belonging, institutional safety, funding continuity, and political shelter. Systems evolve to suppress precisely this threshold. They reward alignment, not clarity. Continuity, not truth. Stability, not disruption. Under such conditions, silence is not cowardice. It is rational adaptation.
This is why the critique cannot remain local. What unfolded inside the school is what is unfolding everywhere. Universities, governments, corporations, NGOs, media institutions: all now display the same pattern. Ethical language layered over institutional self-preservation. Moral urgency masking structural inertia. Political theatre replacing genuine leverage. Institutions presenting themselves as solutions while reproducing the uncertainties that justify their existence.
The tragedy is not bad intent. It is systemic capture; not a moral failure so much as a structural one: the inability of institutions to recognise themselves as part of the machinery they have helped create and yet endlessly seek to remediate. The school became a microcosm of the world it set out to analyse. In doing so, it revealed the deeper failure of our age: that without structural self-awareness, even the best intentions become engines of the dynamics they seek to resist.
Daedelus Kite 