Large power systems — empires, blocs, security states, even global institutions — have never truly stabilised themselves by removing uncertainty. They stabilise by circulating it. Their administrative, legal, economic, and military structures function less as closures than as distribution networks for tension. Centre and periphery. Insider and outsider. Stability and threat. These are not failures […]
Extreme concentrations of wealth are not anomalies sitting awkwardly inside an otherwise functioning system. They are what the system becomes when its capacity to attenuate runaway amplification has been compromised. In any open, adaptive system, stability is not achieved through static balance but through a continuous negotiation between reinforcing and dispersive forces. Positive feedback generates […]
Anarchy is usually flattened into a cartoon of riots and broken windows, a synonym for chaos or nihilism. In fact, it comes from the Greek ἀναρχία (anarkhia), meaning “without a ruling principle” or “without a sovereign head,” pointing less to disorder than to the absence of imposed hierarchy. Political economy distorts this by treating central […]
In engineering, delay looks like a nuisance variable. Control theorists worry about time lags because they introduce phase shifts that destabilise feedback loops and narrow the safe bandwidth of a system. Communications theory treats delay as a parameter of the channel, then focuses on encoding schemes that maximise reliable transmission given noise, finite capacity, and […]
In recent years, large language models have moved along a gradient from research artefacts into everyday infrastructure—search, email, design tools, call centres, legal drafting, medical triage. They operate by predicting the next token in a sequence, trained on vast corpora of text and code. Their fluency comes from compression, not comprehension. They do not possess […]
Rosalind Franklin (1920–1958) was a pioneering British chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose meticulous work provided critical insights into the structure of DNA. Her photograph 51, capturing the helical diffraction pattern of DNA fibres, was instrumental in revealing the molecule’s double-helix form, though her contributions were long overshadowed by others who built upon her data. Working […]
The more precisely a technological system is engineered—its algorithms finely tuned, its processes deeply automated, its data flows tightly orchestrated—the more space is created for chaotic ambiguity to hide in the seams. In social media, for instance, the apparatus of engagement-metrics, feed-ranking, and viral amplification claim clarity and intent, yet they spawn unpredictable collective behaviour: […]
Autonomous technological systems now routinely adjust themselves through internal feedback: machine-learning pipelines that retrain on their own outputs, trading algorithms that react to price movements they partly create, recommendation systems that optimise engagement based on the behaviours they induce. Human input still exists, but it is sampled as data, not held as authority. Governance happens […]
Humans are exceptional imitators. From infancy, neural systems prioritise social learning, language acquisition, and behavioural mirroring because copying is cheap, fast, and scalable compared to individual trial-and-error. Cultural transmission compounds this: ideas, habits, tools, symbols, and institutions propagate through imitation, modification, and re-imitation across generations. Genetic evolution provided the substrate, but memetic and cultural reproduction […]
When people talk about “nothing,” they usually mean a lack — no matter, no signal, no data. Yet across the sciences, absence is rarely empty. It has structure. It sets limits. It shapes how systems form and how they hold together. At the core of logic, physics, computation, and cognition, the boundaries of what can […]
Systems don’t hold their shape by conviction. They hold it by habit, cadence, and the slow accretion of tiny decisions that feel neutral while they’re happening. What we call an “economic model” or a “political order” is just a particular tuning of incentives, language, and expectation. Shift the tuning and the whole field reconfigures. The […]
Invisible disability exposes a structural mismatch between experience and assessment. Institutions rely on narrow snapshots — fixed criteria, discrete checkboxes, procedural thresholds — to determine what counts as relevant evidence. These frames compress complexity into a form legible to an administrative workflow, but the compression also screens out the fluctuating cognitive load, episodic variation, and […]
Daedelus Kite 