The Physics of Communication: The Hidden Dynamics of Language, Meaning and Reality

At planetary scale, communication unfolds through billions of interacting nervous systems, generating collective currents, concentrations and disturbances with dynamics familiar from gases and plasmas. These encounters take place through people connected by language, technologies and institutions. Memory, fear, expectation and interpretation affect which signals are amplified, resisted or passed on. Electrical and chemical activity becomes speech, gesture and digital transmission; what comes back changes what happens next. Density, timing and diffusion are part of this ongoing physical process. Its collective patterns emerge through what people feel, understand and do. Language has a harmonic structure, with recurring rhythms and relationships that persist even as the people, words and circumstances change.

Across these different physical systems, persistence depends on patterned change. A gas retains collective properties while its molecules move in different directions; a language retains meaning while its expressions change. Neither can be understood entirely by examining its individual parts. Differences, dependencies and delays give rise to the identities we subsequently treat as separate things. In communication, repetition, timing and response establish rhythms into which people become entrained. Meaning persists because certain relationships remain recognisable even when the words change. This is part of the relationship between semantics and frequency. Agreement is unnecessary. Accusation and furious denial can sustain an argument for years, with every rebuttal keeping it alive. The participants oppose one another while jointly reproducing the conflict that keeps them occupied.

More communication creates more opportunities for these patterns to spread. Where attention earns money or political influence, provoking further reaction becomes rewarding. Research has shown that engagement-based ranking can amplify hostile political content. Consider a cycle of escalating unrest: confrontation produces images, images provoke outrage, outrage encourages further confrontation, and new images keep the cycle going. People exploit these relationships deliberately, but what they set in motion often extends beyond their intentions. The patterns recruit people, resources and infrastructure into keeping them going. Belief and repetition play a part in this, because familiar patterns can remain convincing even when their individual claims or expressions change. What spreads most successfully is not necessarily what is true, useful or good for anyone involved.

Communication also consumes energy, resources and attention. Problems arise when patterns that are successful locally damage the wider conditions that support them. Trust, attention and opportunities to recover from mistakes can be exhausted alongside material resources. When disturbance generates revenue or political advantage, there is an incentive to keep producing it. Regulation needs to address those incentives, the speed of escalation and who ends up bearing the consequences. The frequency-domain approach looks at timing, repetition and reinforcement rather than treating every message as an isolated event. The aim is not to control what everyone thinks. It is to change the conditions that reward destructive behaviour while preserving room for disagreement, adaptation and correction. Institutions need to remain open to correction too. Otherwise, protecting themselves becomes another way of keeping the problem alive.

This explanation is also part of what it describes. Writing it, reading it, disagreeing with it or passing it on changes the relationships through which further communication happens. The words are part of the same process as the things they describe. This is where The Unpluggable Hole becomes relevant. We cannot describe the world from somewhere outside it. Language changes the world from within, while the world continues beyond whatever boundaries our descriptions draw. There is always more going on than any explanation can contain, including this one. A course, a rubric or a product can help people engage with these relationships, but none owns them or captures the whole process. Understanding something does not require claiming authority over it. Nor does changing something require controlling everything around it. We can recognise destructive patterns, change the conditions that keep them going and remain willing to correct ourselves. Institutional respectability becomes an obstacle when every acceptable innovation must preserve the arrangements responsible for the problem. We end up producing more of the same shit with increasing efficiency.