Categories
politics

Barnaby’s Choice

Barnaby Joyce’s sprint into One Nation marks a shift from policy argument to performance theatre. It is not a conversion so much as a wager: that in a crowded media field the shortest message wins. One Nation’s platform thrives on what could be called ideological constipation — gripping a few ideas so tightly they can […]

Categories
cybernetics

System Dynamics and Surface Rules: Sharkskin, Political Economy

Shark skin is a sheet of teeth: millimetre-scale placoid denticles, each with an enamel crown, dentine core and pulp cavity, rooted in the dermis and oriented from nose to tail so that one way feels smooth and the other rasps like sandpaper. In fast swimmers such as the shortfin mako Isurus oxyrinchus and other pelagic […]

Categories
cybernetics

The Hand of Law

Law presents itself as a guardian of rights and social peace, but its core function is to preserve the legal order and the interests that dominate it. Rights are recognised only when they stabilise that order; when they challenge the hierarchy that sustains it, they are restricted or quietly ignored. Property is the central unit […]

Categories
culture

Hollow Holidays

Christmas spending has outpaced inflation and wage growth for decades, with December positioned as the decisive profit window for major retailers. Advertising cycles, gift-card ecosystems, seasonal product ranges, and logistics surges now shape the holiday more than any liturgical calendar. Across the UK, US, and Australia, most households report financial strain, with clear spikes in […]

Categories
humanity

Slimeball Devolution

Artificial intelligence has become the most efficient amplifier of natural stupidity ever devised. The cause is structural: mass communication systems decay toward noise and impulse, and we are now at the point where that decay becomes dangerous. Yet most are too busy chasing disposable commercial distractions to notice. Patience erodes, volatility rises, and collective intelligence […]

Categories
cybernetics

Apollo and Daphne

Symmetry, anti-symmetry, and the orbit of desire If art has any enduring value, it lies in the way it makes structure visible. Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne does not just illustrate a myth. It renders a relational geometry: two frames locked in a shared field, unable to close without erasing themselves. The sculpture holds a single […]

Categories
cybernetics

A pocketful of futures

How possibility becomes reality, and why that gap keeps us alive. Time is what turns possibility into fact, starlight into living dust, experience into oblivion. Holding a stone in your hand is holding a pocket full of unrealised futures: nothing has moved, yet movement is waiting. Let it go and those possibilities rush into action […]

Categories
Philosophy

Sums of Anarchy

Attempts to stabilise volatile systems by force tend to amplify and exacerbate the volatility they were intended to contain. Sons of Anarchy staged this in miniature: each shortcut, retaliation, or opportunistic scheme deepened the instability that provoked it. The club kept solving yesterday’s damage with tomorrow’s disaster because the logic driving their decisions never changed. […]

Categories
cybernetics

The Sociocognitive Dangers of AI

We are building machines that can talk, draft, diagnose, summarise, and imitate. Each month the interface becomes smoother; each week the latency shrinks. The friction that once shaped our thinking — the tiny deferrals through which thought organises itself — is being polished away. It feels like progress because the response arrives quickly and looks […]

Categories
cybernetics

Australia Bets the Future on Big Tech’s “Trust Us” Doctrine

Context: Artificial intelligence to be managed through existing laws as Australia unveils national AI plan Australia has chosen to manage artificial intelligence through “existing laws” and “industry-led standards,” a position repeated across today’s public messaging: flexible oversight, voluntary guardrails, and a promise that the newly announced AI Safety Institute will advise, not constrain. Ministers point […]

Categories
Philosophy

Anxiety

Your anxieties are borrowed, acquired, entrained, but the texture of feeling them is yours alone. These signals arise through culture, history, and language, yet the awareness they ignite forms at a singular point no one else can enter or confirm. Much of what feels personal is relationally field-borne and stabilised through repetition, but the immediate […]

Categories
Philosophy

YouTube: Algorithmic Misanthropy

The feed keeps trying to teach me that power is something you copy from people who already have too much of it. The platform pushes one rhythm: admire wealth, follow dominance, narrow yourself until you match the beat it rewards. But nothing alive survives by doing that. Identity only holds together when it keeps a […]