Categories
Philosophy

Structural Insecurity Precedes Moral Failure

Racism, misogyny, and other forms of exclusion recur not because they are compelling, justified, or desirable, but because large-scale social systems are biased toward generating them, or things like them, under stress. Calling this structural does not mean denying choice. People do make choices, good, bad, and ugly, and they live with the consequences of […]

Categories
Philosophy

Teresa Brennan: Philosophy of Affect

Teresa Brennan was an Australian feminist philosopher whose work crossed psychoanalysis, philosophy, and social theory, frequently placing her at odds with academic orthodoxy. She challenged dominant Lacanian interpretations by insisting that affect is not a linguistic effect or private feeling but a materially transmissible force that moves between bodies and across institutions. This stance drew […]

Categories
cybernetics language Philosophy

Living Inside Language

We learn to navigate the world by drawing lines through it. Self and other. Mind and world. Human and machine. These distinctions help us function, the way handrails help us walk down unfamiliar stairs. They stabilise action and expectation. But they are not where reality begins. They are not built into the fabric of existence. […]

Categories
Philosophy

Kindness is Sacred

Your happiness, your humanity, your goodness are not grounded in power, domination, control, or wealth. They arise from something far older and far less containable: the living, unbounded field of human life itself, of which each person is a singular instance, including the frightened and the angry. That field is complex, paradoxical, and irreducible. Much […]

Categories
cybernetics Philosophy

Turn it Off

Autocorrect does not correct language. It normalises it. It quietly collapses variation, cadence, hesitation, and idiosyncratic drift into a statistically preferred surface. In doing so, it narrows vocabulary and cognition, nudging expression toward higher-probability words and away from outliers that often carry intent and conceptual precision. What it offers as clarity is often conformity. What […]

Categories
Philosophy

Predatory Opportunism in University Systems

University systems are not simply organised around knowledge, discovery, or intellectual community. Those are decorative claims. The real game is status. Universities function as credential factories and hierarchy-maintenance machines, where prestige, funding position, and reputational insulation matter far more than whether anything true, useful, or unsettling is learned. This is predatory opportunism in institutional form. […]

Categories
Philosophy

Philosophical Alienation

Consciousness entails perspectival isolation. Subjective experience is necessarily local, bounded by the fact that one mind does not have direct access to another. Philosophy of mind, phenomenology, and cognitive science converge on this constraint, whether framed as first-person authority, privacy of qualia, or irreducible point of view. Language does not remove this barrier. It operationalises […]

Categories
Philosophy

2026 Technocracy: More Control, Less Comprehension

We are likely worrying about the wrong thing. The danger is not that AI amplifies stupidity, volatility, selfishness, or ideological corruption. The danger is the speed of that amplification, the smoothness with which it integrates into ordinary life, and the ease with which this acceleration is framed as inevitable. It is not inevitable. But velocity […]

Categories
Philosophy

Stultification Tsunami

The problem is not stupidity. Stupid ideas, taken individually, are manageable. They can be argued with, filtered, contextualised, ignored, or simply outgrown. Human cultures have always contained vast quantities of nonsense and survived quite well. That is not what is new. What is new is scale. A tsunami is not dangerous because each molecule of […]

Categories
language

Symbolic Traffic

Language is a game in which winning, or apparent success, is characterised, celebrated, and sustained by the relational value of tokens within it. What actually wins is the communication system itself. Human projects, without exception, are functions of belief within language, of language. Success is the generation of more language. Wealth, politics, and sociocultural dominance […]

Categories
Philosophy

Planetary Leadership Crisis

We are not simply, or only, facing a crisis of leadership or values. We are facing a coordination failure at planetary scale, driven by technologies and institutions that reward domination, speed, and spectacle while quietly eroding the conditions that make intelligence, civilisation, and continuity possible at all. This is not a morality play. It is […]

Categories
Philosophy

Hollow States

No complex system is complete, and none ever settles into final coherence. It persists by operating near its own failure modes, always collapsing toward equilibrium without arriving there. This condition is not exceptional; it is constitutive. Collapse is not what ends systems, but what allows them to reproduce themselves. Systems endure by continuously redistributing error, […]