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 […]
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 […]
The stories we inherit about war and history don’t just describe conflict; they compress it into forms we can carry. That simplification is partly necessary—communication always trims reality to fit inside language—but it also steers us toward the kinds of situations those stories claim to explain. Myths of courage, sacrifice, and righteous struggle arise after […]
When I was young, I was immersed in the full spectrum of popular culture—stories, myths, comics, and games that framed the world through conflict, difference, and the clean lines of good and evil. What later generations found in computer war games, I first found in Commando comics, Greek epics, Tolkien, and tabletop quests. These weren’t […]
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 […]
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 […]
It is a dying practise. Even as automation bludgeons narrative salience and nuance into the cognitively and culturally low-functioning relational slurry that it has now become, our thought patterns and socioeconomic reflexes adapt and align along with it. Try writing without AI. Feel the difference. That is natural intelligence. That is life.
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, […]
First rule of recovery from a catastrophic medical event: assume nothing from the systems around you. Social, institutional, and community services can offer only a faint outline of psychosocial or emotional support because they understand only a faint outline of themselves — their own roles, goals, and the long tail of unexpected consequences that accompanies […]
A stroke is the abrupt loss of blood flow to brain tissue, either because a vessel is blocked or because it ruptures. The former is ischaemic, the latter haemorrhagic, and both are catastrophic in different ways. One starves neurons, the other floods the surrounding tissue under pressure. Either path leaves a sudden absence where function […]
Field Integration Protocol — Metaphysical Complexity in Organisational Strategy 1. Orientation Every organisation lives within a field larger than itself—an ecology of signal and response. Leadership is not command but participation in coherence. Institutions, like thought, are recursive epistemic fields. They translate the world into language, law, and data. When translation hardens into doctrine, systems […]
Ambiguity is not the failure of truth; it is the field through which truth sustains itself. What we name “disinformation” is simply the deliberate modulation of this ambiguity—the thickening of uncertainty at the edges so that order can stabilise at the centre. Systems depend on that tension. Clarity cannot exist without contrast, nor coherence without […]
Daedelus Kite 