Capitalism and communism present themselves as opposites, yet both begin with the same compression: they take a complex, adaptive system and force it through one organising idea — or a narrow family of constraints — then mistake that reduction for governance and, by proxy, for reality. Market systems emphasise decentralised exchange; planned systems emphasise central […]
Once you accept that the current crop of wickedness, grift, juvenile cosplay machismo, narcissistic greed and open betrayal of the public is not an aberration but the operating system, something else steps forward with a kind of horrifying slapstick clarity. The whole thing is absurd. Not metaphorically, not as a clever literary flourish, but structurally. […]
Marcus Aurelius observed that all we ever encounter — this continuous present in which the world appears at all — is precisely what stands to be lost at the moment of death, not as a possession but as the condition of experience itself. Past and future exist only as internal operations within this aperture, memory […]
Extreme wealth is not just a larger version of ordinary success. Beyond a certain point, it becomes a structural feature of the systems that organise society itself. Modern civilisation runs on coordination: finance, law, technology, logistics, media, administration. These systems manage complexity by translating the world into symbols — money, data, metrics, legal categories. They […]
Technology is no longer a peripheral factor in abuse and social harm. It has become part of the mechanism. Research on technology-facilitated coercive control shows how perpetrators use everyday digital tools — smartphones, cloud accounts, GPS services, social media, spyware, smart home systems — to extend surveillance, isolation and intimidation beyond physical proximity, making abuse […]
The recurring tension over Taiwan is often described as a clash of policies, alliances, red lines or historical claims. But at a structural level it behaves more like a maintained gradient in a communicative field. Large national identities do not simply persist by consensus or memory. They require articulated vectors – directions of tension that […]
Large power systems — empires, blocs, security states, even global institutions — have never truly stabilised themselves by removing uncertainty. They stabilise by circulating it. Their administrative, legal, economic, and military structures function less as closures than as distribution networks for tension. Centre and periphery. Insider and outsider. Stability and threat. These are not failures […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
In recent years, large language models have moved along a gradient from research artefacts into everyday infrastructure—search, email, design tools, call centres, legal drafting, medical triage. They operate by predicting the next token in a sequence, trained on vast corpora of text and code. Their fluency comes from compression, not comprehension. They do not possess […]
Rosalind Franklin (1920–1958) was a pioneering British chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose meticulous work provided critical insights into the structure of DNA. Her photograph 51, capturing the helical diffraction pattern of DNA fibres, was instrumental in revealing the molecule’s double-helix form, though her contributions were long overshadowed by others who built upon her data. Working […]
Daedelus Kite 