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Philosophy

Subscription

In a world that has deeply and intractably commercialised the concept and experience of individuality, the very last thing actually required of us is to be different. We are sorted and we voluntarily self-sort into labels and categories, compressing ourselves into neat, data-ready boxes that serve as containers for self-managed subscription into vast machines of […]

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language

Short-Circuit

Meaning arises and endures only because experience and symbolic encoding remain out of phase, and when technology collapses that difference into immediacy and semiotic isomorphism, thought and behaviour collapse into preordained reflex, short-circuiting cognitive voltage into volatility, simplicity, and coercive transmissibility, turning language into a direct instrument of behavioural modulation.

Categories
politics

Australian Democracy: One Country, Many Ways

Australia works because it stays balanced. Its democracy is not built on simple agreement, but on the disciplined interaction between different ways of seeing the world. Labor and Liberal are not just rival teams. Together, they form the smallest political structure capable of holding a complex society together. Two sides generate debate, correction, and restraint. […]

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Philosophy

On Being Smart in Stupid Times

Intelligence is becoming a liability. Not socially ornamental intelligence, not credentialed cleverness, but actual understanding. The kind that sees structure, delay, recursion, consequence. The kind that notices when a system is lying to itself. That form of intelligence generates friction. It interrupts performance. It destabilises belonging. It exposes the hidden costs that simple stories are […]

Categories
technology

Policing Generative Tool Use

It does not matter whether you write with generative technologies or not. If you have no ideas, no curiosity, no necessity to think, then artificial intelligence will simply amplify the emptiness. It will generate fluent noise, decorative coherence, and nothing else. The result is regurgitated pattern-matching, consumed as novelty and mistaken for intelligence. Most people […]

Categories
Philosophy

Corruptible Scholasticism

Institutional scholasticism does not primarily exist to discover truth. It exists to reproduce itself. It operates through status hierarchies, reputational gating, and compliance rituals that slowly but efficiently select against intellectual risk. Advancement depends less on clarity, insight, or courage than on strategic alignment, calibrated language, and ritual citation. Academic publishing, the circulatory system of […]

Categories
cybernetics

Algorithmic Censorship

Across the major platforms, something subtle but consistent is happening. Posts rise, gather momentum, then stall at almost exactly the same threshold, regardless of topic, audience, or timing. The curve flattens not because interest disappears, but because propagation is capped. This pattern repeats on LinkedIn, WordPress, X, Instagram, and beyond. Visibility has become a controlled […]

Categories
cybernetics

Technocratic Tyrrany

We use technologies that also use us. Over time, methods are formalised into metrics, metrics are stabilised into categories of meaning, and tools designed to assist begin to define which actions are recognised as valid. What once supported activity becomes background infrastructure. The tools move to the centre. Human experience no longer anchors them; it […]

Categories
cybernetics Philosophy

Turn it Off

Autocorrect does not correct language. It normalises it. It quietly collapses variation, cadence, hesitation, and idiosyncratic drift into a statistically preferred surface. In doing so, it narrows vocabulary and cognition, nudging expression toward higher-probability words and away from outliers that often carry intent and conceptual precision. What it offers as clarity is often conformity. What […]

Categories
cybernetics

Productive Misanthropy

Service delivery systems must model the environments they act within. This is unavoidable. Eligibility rules, risk categories, performance metrics, and compliance frameworks are all abstractions that allow action under constraint. The model is not the world. It is an interface that reduces complexity to something administrable. Over time, however, the interface acquires weight. The abstraction […]

Categories
cybernetics

Field Logic and Semiotics

This essay advances a limited but precise claim: meaning in communicative systems depends on structured delay, and that delay is constitutive of causal relations rather than incidental to them. Where there is a point of emission and a point of reception, the signal that passes between them is not merely a connector. It participates in […]

Categories
Philosophy

2026 Technocracy: More Control, Less Comprehension

We are likely worrying about the wrong thing. The danger is not that AI amplifies stupidity, volatility, selfishness, or ideological corruption. The danger is the speed of that amplification, the smoothness with which it integrates into ordinary life, and the ease with which this acceleration is framed as inevitable. It is not inevitable. But velocity […]