Categories
cybernetics

Sensemaking in Organisations

Karl Weick’s Sensemaking in Organizations emerged from a dissatisfaction with how organisations were typically described: as decision machines, information processors, or rational planners. Weick’s work cut against that grain. Drawing on psychology, sociology, and organisational studies, he focused instead on how people inside organisations actually come to understand what they are doing, usually after they […]

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cybernetics

Field Logic and Semiotics

This essay advances a limited but precise claim: meaning in communicative systems depends on structured delay, and that delay is constitutive of causal relations rather than incidental to them. Where there is a point of emission and a point of reception, the signal that passes between them is not merely a connector. It participates in […]

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history

AI Market Collapse as Political Reset Switch

What we are seeing does not require villains of unusual intelligence. Systems theory already explains it. Given enough time, scale, and communicative density, a field that rewards information throughput over stability will drift toward political decay. When wealth, power, and cultivated ignorance align inside technologically mediated communicative systems, destructive behaviour does not need intent or […]

Categories
physics

Quantum Confusion: Institutional Inertia

We are taught to treat quantum mechanics as intrinsically strange, opaque, almost hostile to intuition. The standard story is that reality itself is bizarre, and that only extreme mathematical sophistication grants partial access to it. Yet this framing quietly ignores another possibility: that many workable intuitions, partial models, and genuinely useful ways of thinking never […]

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cybernetics

Policy Brief: Field Logic, Delay, and Runaway Self-Reinforcement

Field logic approaches complex systems as relational fields sustained by difference over time, not as collections of discrete components governed by linear causation. It is most relevant where systems are fast, tightly coupled, and vulnerable to runaway self-reinforcement, as in contemporary technological, media, and political environments. In these regimes prediction does not mean forecasting specific […]

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cybernetics

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 […]

Categories
technology

Divided

Technologically mediated communication intensifies what language has always done: it isolates, divides, and distances us from one another, and from ourselves, as a necessary precondition for meaningful communicative experience to arise at all. Given the nature of the world, I carry a quiet regret at not having known more people more fully, even while understanding […]

Categories
Philosophy

Philosophical Alienation

Consciousness entails perspectival isolation. Subjective experience is necessarily local, bounded by the fact that one mind does not have direct access to another. Philosophy of mind, phenomenology, and cognitive science converge on this constraint, whether framed as first-person authority, privacy of qualia, or irreducible point of view. Language does not remove this barrier. It operationalises […]

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cybernetics

Meaning: Uncertainty Disco

Meaning does not exist in words, ideas, or intentions taken in isolation. It arises from a relational system in which elements acquire significance only through their differences from one another over time. Words are defined by other words; references defer to further references; interpretation always lags expression. That lag is not an accident or a […]

Categories
history

Stranger Kings

Evil did not arrive with a plan. It arrived pre-installed, the natural orientation of relationally networked complexity at scale, settling into low-energy states and the familiar attractors of corruption, populism, and conflict. There are puppet-masters and greedy, demonic characters involved, certainly, but even they are mostly riding that prebuilt wave. They do not invent the […]

Categories
cybernetics

Civilisation Collapse

Civilisation is not a stable object. It is a continuous process of partial failure and provisional repair, with collapse always occurring somewhere while continuity is maintained elsewhere. What changes is not whether collapse happens, but its rate, distribution, and perceptibility. When coordination, trust, and meaning decay faster than institutions can reconstitute them, collapse ceases to […]

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cybernetics

Service Delivery: Delay Is the Control Parameter

Executive summary Delay is not a flaw to be engineered away. It is the control parameter that sets a system’s operating frequency. Most complex organisational and institutional service delivery systems tend to fail when their timing is misaligned with the realities they are intended to regulate. That misalignment is rarely visible as a single “slow […]