Categories
cybernetics

Populism as Data Infrastructure

Populist tribalism is not merely a political mood. It is a communication environment unusually rich in signal, repetition, affect, antagonism, identity, fear, loyalty, humiliation, accusation, and recurrence. This matters because large digital platforms are not neutral carriers of public feeling. Their commercial systems depend on sustained engagement, behavioural prediction, data extraction, and increasingly fine-grained user […]

Categories
cybernetics

Alignment

It has probably always been the case that seeking respite from the endless surge of unhinged political stupidity feels futile, exasperating, and frightening. Watching poorly understood belief systems grind on, reproducing themselves through humanity as distributed patterns of alignment within the communicative field rather than arising from deliberate, individual choice, is unsettling. The fear comes […]