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cybernetics

Academia Abhors Cleverness

Academia abhors cleverness—but only the kinds that don’t reproduce its current coinage of acceptable thought. What gets protected is the signalling, not the insight. Language becomes currency; cleverness that fails to replicate the prevailing mintage of disciplinary and political vocabulary is filtered out. It’s not conscious—most of the time, it’s reflex. The institution doesn’t select […]

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cybernetics

Prohibition: Supply and Demand

Prohibition, as a policy archetype, emerges from an institutional reflex: control harm by restricting access. At surface level, this seems rational. But the U.S. opioid crisis reveals its flaw with brutal clarity. Decades of interdiction, scheduling, and enforcement have not stopped overdose deaths—they’ve amplified them. Synthetic opioids like fentanyl bypass traditional supply chains, intensify risk, […]

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cybernetics

Prohibition Fail: Illicit Tobacco in Australia

Attempts to prohibit are not failures of intelligence but failures of systemic insight. The logic is recursive: the more force applied to negate a behaviour, the more structure is built around that behaviour to preserve it. Prohibition becomes a generator — not a suppressor — of the phenomenon it targets. The system does not respond […]

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cybernetics

Field Logic: Syntax for Meaning in Distributed Systems

In an age defined by information overload and communicative saturation, the core structure of meaning is straining under its own weight. Traditional accounts of meaning—rooted in symbols, representation, and local causality—struggle to explain how coherence persists across fragmented, dynamic, and scale-invariant systems. A growing body of work points toward something more subtle and robust: not […]

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cybernetics

When Reflexivity Fails: The Cybernetic Collapse of a School That Should Have Known Better

In the mid-20th century, cybernetics emerged as a radical rethinking of systems, observers, and the recursive loops that bind them. It was never a closed discipline but a method of inquiry—a tool for understanding how systems regulate themselves and how observers entangle with the phenomena they study. It cut across biology, engineering, psychology, and philosophy. […]

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cybernetics

University Lies

Universities, for all their pomp and architecture, are backward-facing institutions addicted to the rituals of their own inertia. They speak of innovation but train compliance. They gesture toward the future while embedding students—brilliant, strange, misaligned students—into the bureaucratic tedium of a past they dare not question. This isn’t education. It’s archival maintenance. The lecture hall […]

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cybernetics

The Point is a Lie: Dispatches from the Loop

Let’s abandon the fantasy that meaning lives in the shiny dots we poke at on our cognitive touchscreens. The truth? There are no points—only loops. Every time you think you’ve arrived at a fact, you’re just catching a system mid-recursion, folding itself into a stable-enough pattern to momentarily appear intelligible. That pattern, which you mistake […]

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cybernetics

Complex Language

The slow, recursive attenuation of literacy, numeracy, and general socio-affective competency is a contemporary instance of distributed entropic diffusion. This systemic informational metabolism leads to the kind of exasperated volatility and confusion that fuels partisan perseveration in political or ideological spheres. While long, complex sentences may offer resistance to the automated flattening of language, they […]

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cybernetics

Formal Inertia

Mathematics is powerful not because it captures the world, but because it captures a way of speaking about the world—an internally consistent, symbolic shorthand for logical necessity. The danger arises when this shorthand, born of abstraction and reduction, is mistaken for the thing itself. We begin to force the world into the constraints of the […]

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cybernetics

Peace and War

Look, peace and war aren’t opposites in any meaningful structural sense—they’re entangled attractors on the same semantic surface. They both pull from the same underlying logic of deferral and substitution; they’re different inflections of the same topological fold. Once you start mapping this—especially post-machine learning, post-automation turn—what you find isn’t polarity, it’s proximity. The concepts […]

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cybernetics

Democracy, redux

Democracies now find themselves grappling with something deeper than electoral cycles or policy gridlock. The very substrate they rely on—shared information, communication, interpretation—has fundamentally changed. The informational field is no longer a backdrop; it’s an autonomous, dynamic system, with its own turbulence, feedback loops, and emergent properties. It behaves like weather: shifting, recursive, indifferent to […]

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cybernetics

Attention Dynamics at Scale

Attention at scale is volumetric—recursive, entropic, structural. You don’t transmit clean signals through this system. You fracture attention, saturate the surface with rhythmic displacement, let the structure self-propagate. The topological field—as exponentiated relation of relations—holds tension, not messages. Meaning flickers, but drift sustains. Influence emerges as deformation, interference, long slow-wave gradients of entropic drift. You […]