Categories
Philosophy

Blowing Bubbles

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 […]

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Philosophy

Beyond Hierarchy

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 […]

Categories
Philosophy

System Delay is Constitutive

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 […]

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Philosophy

Conflicted

History shows a stable pattern: societies primed by threat return to it. Empires on the edge of famine, cities rattled by panic, alliances strained by distrust — once a population’s autonomic systems are pushed into vigilance, they begin to synchronise. Cortisol-charged attention, restricted horizons, and defensive postures propagate through rumours, media, and crowd behaviour. High-tension […]

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Philosophy

Peace, Love and Understanding

Nick Lowe wrote “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding” in 1974, but it was Elvis Costello’s 1979 version that gave it its permanent voltage. Costello took a gentle lament and drove it harder, tighter, with that clipped, anxious delivery that felt like someone shouting into a cultural headwind. By the time it appeared […]

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Philosophy

Creativity Matters

Expressing ideas with, without, through, or as technological mediation isn’t the issue. The trouble begins with what we expect that mediation to deliver. The moment we try to instrumentalise the whole field—writing, sharing, signalling, transmitting—we quietly become the instrument. We become the relay. The medium. A carrier for systems and incentives that were never ours […]

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Philosophy

Moral Choice

Power attracts projection. People excuse elite misconduct to preserve the illusion that dominance is earned rather than contingent, that wealth signals wisdom rather than the accumulated accidents of structure, timing, and luck. That projection is not merely psychological; it stabilises the system by protecting the myth that status reflects virtue. Predatory opportunism thrives in that […]

Categories
language

Semantic Pantomime

They are running a government as if language were a spellbook. Say the thing, and reality must comply; deny the thing, and it must vanish. It is a kindergarten pantomime of semantics—an infantile cosmology where words are treated as prior to the world rather than produced by (as emergent from) it. The corruption and the […]

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cybernetics Philosophy

Civilisation is Choking on Greed

Civilisation was never meant to run on panic, yet that is the rhythm we’ve drifted into. The public story insists we are building a future, but the machinery underneath tells a different tale — one of shortening time-horizons, defensive accumulation, and a cultural field tuned to performance rather than survival. The great systems of finance, […]

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Philosophy

The Logic that Lives

Life, in its most abstract sense, is a contradiction that refuses to resolve. It persists as a dynamic equilibrium between forces that can never perfectly align. Every organism, idea, or particle exists not by finding rest but by orbiting imbalance—by sustaining tension as continuity. The living field is not static; it is recursive, a looping […]

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Philosophy

Living Energy Fields

Peter Mitchell was a British biochemist who transformed biology by introducing the chemiosmotic theory — the idea that cells generate energy through electrochemical gradients across membranes, overturning the then-dominant mechanistic view of metabolism. “I cannot consider the organism without its environment… from a formal point of view the two may be regarded as equivalent phases […]

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Philosophy

Dracula: The Dark Compass

It was a poor family’s living room, perhaps middle-aged in its furnishings—brown vinyl couch, lace curtains, the dull hum of the refrigerator cutting through the silence. Count Dracula stood in the doorway, narrating the long drift of history to the wife of the man he had just turned, consumed as undead. “I knew the future […]