Facts may not be sacred in practice, but the alternative is shameless informational feudalism: a world in which power determines visibility, visibility determines belief, and belief dissociatively drifts away from the world it claims to describe.
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of red caps and lacquered smiles
The court of red caps and lacquered smiles now finds itself chained to a king who mistakes appetite for destiny and spectacle for wisdom at precisely the historical moment requiring restraint, literacy, diplomacy, patience, and institutional coherence.
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impermanence
There are evenings where the sky itself appears aware of some immense and unspoken sadness, as though the atmosphere has briefly become conscious of time and cannot quite contain the weight of it. Not despair exactly. Not tragedy in the theatrical sense. Something older, quieter, and more pervasive than that. A diffuse melancholy without stable […]
Malakacene: the long historical moment in which technologically mediated societies stopped selecting primarily for competence, wisdom, restraint, and institutional responsibility, and instead became increasingly vulnerable to the rapid propagation of spectacle, grievance, aggression, narcissism, and performative certainty masquerading as leadership.
Technologically mediated democracies are invoking remedial, simplified political coherence faster than they are generating the intelligence and/or aptitude required to govern the accelerating complexity of contemporary socioeconomic experience.
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Ebola
Ebola reminds us that civilisation may not fail through drama, but through delay, distraction, and a pathogen moving faster than our institutional cadence and cultural expectations.
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The Architecture of Absence
A strong current in modern thought still treats things as if they exist first, complete in themselves, and only later enter into relation with other things. The individual. The institution. The nation-state. The market. The technological platform. These are often imagined as discrete objects possessing internal coherence, as though persistence were generated primarily from within […]
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Barry, from Parramatta
A technologically-mediated civilisation has built planetary systems of prediction and control around biological reflexes still calibrated for tribe, threat, status, and symbolic belonging.
There is, at present, a strange cultural requirement to pretend that billionaires are evidence of societal success rather than evidence of systemic imbalance.
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Peace, please…
For years, he sold himself as the man who could end wars through instinct, pressure, spectacle, and personal dominance alone, yet the deeper problem now emerging in the Middle East is not merely strategic failure but the exposure of an intellectual and moral vacuum at the centre of that performance. Peace is not a television […]
It took me a long time and much exasperation to recognise and acknowledge that the first rule of communication systems theory club is: do not tell people about the theory. Not because the theory is secret. Because the theory is ineffective as information. People are not waiting for a better model of the system that […]
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Loneliness: The Cost of Connection
In post-industrial Western societies, relationships increasingly pass through technological and transactional systems before they pass directly between people. Friendship, intimacy, courtship, status, belonging: much of social life now moves through screens, platforms, metrics, services, and algorithmic surfaces. Distance has collapsed. Presence has become persistent. The modern person can remain linked to hundreds, even thousands, of […]
Daedelus Kite 