When the ambient communication system is saturated with noise, speed, and compression, ideologies that minimise internal degrees of freedom propagate more easily, not because they are robust but because they repeat cleanly. They return in recognisable form, align with their own prior expressions, and therefore hold attention. Under these conditions, order is produced less by […]
There is a structural limit to populist dynamics that is often missed. Populist themes require an antithesis to remain coherent. Without an opposing force to push against, they do not stabilise or mature; they turn inward. Like fascism in its later stages, the movement begins to consume its own distinctions, purging nuance, then difference, then […]
Broad understanding has not vanished; it has been rendered functionally invisible by systems that cannot hold relations across time and domain. Under the technological turn, visibility accrues to what resolves quickly into a recognisable category, while work that moves across structures, scales, and vocabularies fails to stabilise into signal. This is not a problem of […]
Populism gains traction by pointing at real pressures: housing stress, cost-of-living anxiety, cultural dislocation, institutional distance, a sense that no one is steering. These are not imagined problems. They are the very real conditions that make people receptive to blunt answers and strong voices. The tragedy is that the tools populism offers to address these […]
America is presently in a phase of contraction rather than confidence: heightened suspicion of difference, attempts to reassert a singular national story, and a political atmosphere animated less by vision than by grievance and enforcement. Cultural life has not escaped this. Language, migration, race, and belonging are being pulled back into blunt, exclusionary frames, while […]
In the United States, the early twenty-first-century autocratic turn emerges from a system that was already structurally fragile. Long before any individual leader came to dominate the political field, democratic legitimacy had thinned, institutional trust had decayed, and communicative coherence had been weakened by inequality, media saturation, and sustained disinvestment in public understanding. Into this […]
I came close enough to academia to feel its gravity and to see how hard it pulls on people who arrive with curiosity instead of armour; cf. “spaghettification”. It is not that nothing good happens there. Some of it does, almost by accident. Clever people, often exhausted and underprotected, do manage to push insight through […]
The Dalai Lama’s audiobook, recently recognised with a Grammy, is not framed as a political intervention. It is a work of reflection, oriented toward compassion, ethical responsibility, and the cultivation of inner steadiness. Yet the figure of the Dalai Lama does not circulate in a neutral field. His public presence remains entangled with a long […]
There is a grim existential irony in how those most convinced of possessing an absolute moral truth, acting within a field shaped by fear, reflex, and desire, come to cultivate greed, cruelty, and exclusion in the name of that certainty, mistaking the felt coherence of dominance for righteousness, and remaining largely unaware that what they […]
Identity formation requires antithesis. In the United States, political coherence has long been organised around opposition: liberty against tyranny, democracy against monarchy, capitalism against communism, freedom against control. These oppositions carved boundaries that stabilised national identity, generated purpose, and coordinated collective action. Opposition was not incidental. It was structural. Without it, American identity would have […]
Australia works because it stays balanced. Its democracy is not built on simple agreement, but on the disciplined interaction between different ways of seeing the world. Labor and Liberal are not just rival teams. Together, they form the smallest political structure capable of holding a complex society together. Two sides generate debate, correction, and restraint. […]
It does not matter whether you write with generative technologies or not. If you have no ideas, no curiosity, no necessity to think, then artificial intelligence will simply amplify the emptiness. It will generate fluent noise, decorative coherence, and nothing else. The result is regurgitated pattern-matching, consumed as novelty and mistaken for intelligence. Most people […]
Daedelus Kite 