The purpose of a system is what it does. Stafford Beer’s principle strips away the comfortable illusions of intent and moral posturing to reveal a bleak symmetry between cause and consequence. If a society continually produces homelessness, addiction, disaffection, and loneliness, then these outcomes are not malfunctions—they are the operational outputs of the system. The […]
The further we push description, the more it drifts from the thing described. What begins as a gesture to bring the world close becomes, over time, a mechanism of distance. The machinery of representation translates immediacy into abstraction, and the cost is intimacy itself. To know through description is also to estrange: the signal replaces […]
Fourier showed that any irregular signal, however jagged or complex, could be decomposed into a sum of simple oscillations. This discovery was not just about sines and cosines but about the universality of repetition as a hidden language of change. From radio to medical imaging to data compression, the world runs on this principle: that […]
Dating platforms and social technologies are built around the chase rather than the consummation of intimacy, emotional resonance, or the recognition of social worth. Research on dating app use has shown that the systems rarely deliver enduring outcomes, but rather incentivise continual pursuit, endless swiping, and repetition of cycles of hope and disappointment (Bonilla-Zorita, Griffiths […]
Mental health issues are often asserted as neurochemical or physiological malfunction, located in the individual. Yet this framing conceals how distress emerges from larger social systems, which depend upon gradients of exclusion and disaffection to function. Just as unemployment is not an error but a structural feature of employment markets, sorrow and psychic fracture are […]
Friendship is slipping further into mediation, filtered through technologies and codified social structures. The weight of loneliness grows as connections are rerouted into circuits and systems that promise togetherness but deliver distance. In the unfolding horizon, the future looks stripped of unmediated presence, leaving companionship as an echo carried by machinery. Systems themselves betray the […]
As a general observation regarding science and technology, notice that aggregated explanatory toolsets, artefacts, entities and systems are oriented towards the production and self-validation of knowledge in ways that essentially, perhaps irrevocably, alienate us from ourselves and from each other. Rationally orchestrated system- and self-definition amplifies a signal and gradient of information-as-difference, invoking a function […]
The definitions of words. The definition (or description) of a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a document, a corpus. At the “atomic” level of words, each definition and interpreted meaning is inflated and rendered intelligibly sensible as a function of dependency. All words being defined in terms of other words, and as Bertrand Russell reflects […]
Technologically-mediated communication is creating the global epidemic of loneliness. Alienation and emptiness is a signal amplified by our ubiquitous and omnipresent sense and experience of contemporary connectivity, an inward-turning inflection of systemic extensibility for which we are quite poorly prepared by the majority of our evolutionary history. Kindness fades in these moments as everyone struggles […]
There’s an argument to be made for the notion that the contents of our minds are really nothing more than the reflective internalisation of all that froth and bubble we experience from other people. In such a world in which the contents of each mind are little more that the reverberating reflection of all the […]
There are some failing metaphysical assumptions and troubled subjectivities in the notionally “Western” position and its attendant parochialisms. A drift through deterministic materialism and downstream mechanical (or algorithmic) thinking into untenable philosophical positions also seems somewhat inevitable, if perhaps not entirely irremediable. I am constantly fascinated (and yet to be quite honest also simultaneously horrified) […]
A fine example of the many ways that uniquely high intelligence is antithetical to the worlds we inhabit. Those forms of intellect and problem-solving that percolate to ascendance are generally those that directly (or indirectly) replicate the axioms, assumptions and self-validating value (as belief) systems that already exist. In this way, the world reproduces the […]
Daedelus Kite 