Categories
cybernetics

Uncertainty Dividend

The world’s machinery no longer runs on production or belief but on the circulation of insecurity. Each institution converts unease into its own currency of legitimacy: markets price risk, governments legislate threat, media amplify anxiety into attention, and technology encodes volatility as data. What appears as chaos is the deep structure—a dynamic equilibrium in which […]

Categories
cybernetics

Lattice

Meaning can be understood as relational invariance under transformation. In mathematics, invariance is what stays the same when everything else changes. In physics, such stability gives rise to conservation laws — momentum from translational symmetry, energy from temporal symmetry. Language behaves the same way: its meaning persists not through fixed definitions but through relationships that […]

Categories
cybernetics

People Who Say Nothing

In political and corporate communication, vacuity is often rewarded over insight. Research in media studies demonstrates that message repetition, even without substantive content, significantly increases perceived credibility and importance (Hasher et al. 1977). Political scientists have shown that rhetorical confidence is often taken as a proxy for expertise, regardless of factual accuracy (Petty and Cacioppo […]

Categories
cybernetics

Entropy, Communication, Political System Dynamics

Entropy is not just a principle of physics—it’s a principle of communication. Information systems, whether political, cultural, or technological, don’t move toward clarity; they move toward noise. In American politics, the spectacle of Trump is less about the man than about the logic of replication. Outrage travels faster than nuance, and so outrage becomes the […]

Categories
cybernetics

Noise

The atmosphere of American politics now resembles a dense fog of ideological noise. What registers as outrage, conviction or disgust is less the product of reasoned belief than the mechanics of replication: the simplest, most virulent signals race ahead of nuance. Words once tethered to meaning drift as tokens in a saturated field, their resonance […]

Categories
cybernetics

Stochastic Transmission of Volatile Language

Language drifts as matter drifts: clustering, folding, condensing into nodes of repetition that pass for meaning. It is not even significant what the transmission medium is, because entropy finds its own channels; in the end, the medium is us—our beliefs, our institutions, our most sacrosanct assumptions. Politically this volatility is evident, but volatility is precisely […]

Categories
cybernetics

Social Media: Entropic Confusion

When rolling two six-sided dice, the number seven is most likely not because it is special, but because probability clusters toward the middle. Out of 36 possible combinations, six add to seven, more than any other sum. This is entropy in miniature: the system naturally drifts toward its centre, not by design or meaning, but […]

Categories
cybernetics

The Mirage of AI Wealth

Artificial intelligence is widely proclaimed as a generator of new wealth. The suggestion is that models trained on large datasets, coupled with computational scale, will deliver prosperity by sheer force of information processing. Yet this claim collapses under even modest scrutiny. Wealth cannot be summoned into being by wordplay, nor does it arise automatically from […]

Categories
cybernetics

Wealth: Breaking the Future

Hyman Minsky, an economist who studied the fragility and collapse of financial systems, showed how finance is not neutral but recursive: price rises create collateral, collateral expands credit, and credit drives prices higher still. This acceleration does not move toward equilibrium but toward a critical inflection where reversal cascades through the system. Housing markets in […]

Categories
cybernetics

Rhythm: Cybersecurity as System Cycle

Cybersecurity is usually framed as a protective shield—tools, protocols, and practices designed to block attackers and preserve trust in digital systems. Yet this view obscures the deeper reality. Cybersecurity is not simply about erecting barriers, but about managing a continuous cycle of disruption and repair. Breaches and defences do not occur in isolation; they follow […]

Categories
cybernetics

The Dividend of Displacement: How Corporations Profit by Outsourcing Risk

Corporations today amass wealth not by absorbing risk, but by exporting it. Their growth model turns liability into external burden—shifting costs onto users, public systems, or future generations—while repackaging the residue as progress. Externality as Architecture Digital platforms are engineered to reward the sensational, the divisive, and the viral. Outrage propagates faster than nuance, not […]

Categories
cybernetics

Bureaucracy’s Incentive to Fail

Government services fail not only because of underfunding, incompetence, or political neglect. They fail because of a structural dynamic baked into the way bureaucracies sustain themselves. Take social support systems. The stated function is simple: provide assistance to people who’ve lost their jobs until they can find another. But the actual functioning diverges. The machinery […]