Categories
cybernetics

The Mad King

The Mad King is usually treated as a personality problem. History supplies familiar figures. Erratic rulers, impulsive leaders, volatile decision makers whose behaviour appears to bend events. Yet this framing may be backwards. Instability at the top of power hierarchies may emerge not from individual psychology but from the structure of complex social systems themselves, […]

Categories
music

Hendrix: House Burning Down

When Jimi Hendrix released House Burning Down on Electric Ladyland, American cities were already unstable. The assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy ignited unrest across neighbourhoods shaped by segregation, economic decline, and deteriorating apartment blocks. Buildings burned in riots, but also through opportunism. Some landlords torched failing properties for insurance. Some […]

Categories
cybernetics Peace

Peace is a Managed Service

Peace isn’t some prize at the end of history. It’s not a flag, not a speech, not a deal signed under bright lights with everyone pretending they meant it. It’s a job. A quiet, ongoing, unglamorous job. You run it or it fails. That’s it. It lives in the tension people can tolerate without turning […]

Categories
Philosophy

Barnaby’s Choice

Reports today have drawn attention to remarks by Barnaby Joyce comparing immigration flows to livestock management, a framing criticised for both its tone and its implications. Whatever the intent, language of that kind lands heavily in a moment already charged around migration, borders, and identity. It reduces a complex human process to something blunt, and […]

Categories
cybernetics

The Fool, the Follower, and the Systems That Make Them

Large populations have, at various points in history, rallied behind loud, simple, certainty-projecting figures who promise restoration, strength, or clarity amid confusion, even as those same movements steadily erode the very conditions upon which stability and shared reality depend, the quiet alignment between what people say, what they do, and what the world allows to […]

Categories
communication cybernetics politics

Failure Mode: How Politics Lost Its Groove

Politics is not failing because people have become irrational; it is failing because the systems that coordinate perception, timing, and response have slipped out of phase, and what we are experiencing as conflict, populism, volatility, and institutional drift is the visible surface of a deeper timing problem in large-scale communication systems, one that also describes […]

Categories
communication cybernetics politics

It is not about politics

Across many countries, the current wave of populism looks like a political shift. It is, but it is also something deeper: a change in how communication systems select and stabilise meaning. Large, networked media environments now operate at high speed, uneven timing, and massive scale. In those conditions, not every idea travels equally. Some forms—short, […]

Categories
communication

Fear and Loathing in the Communicative Field

Endless conflict persists not because it is healthy, just, or sustainable, but because fear is highly efficient at moving through uncertain human systems. What spreads easily is not always what nourishes. Fear can be structurally effective while being psychologically corrosive and socially disastrous. That distinction matters. Signals that bind attention quickly can still produce damaged […]

Categories
communication

It’s the news, Jim, just not as we know it

Open a modern news homepage and nothing seems especially unusual. Headlines stack one after another, breaking banners pulse, politicians argue, commentators react, scandals erupt and dissolve, and somewhere among the noise a few careful investigations still appear. Public broadcasters, commercial television networks, global digital outlets and tabloid aggregators all occupy the same surface. They differ […]

Categories
communication

Vapid Rationale: Amateur’s Night on the Global Stage

What we call strategy in world events is almost never that. Significant historical events are routinely narrated as the product of careful planning, institutional continuity, and deliberate intent, yet the public record more reliably shows decisions taken under pressure, justified after the fact, and sustained long after anyone can clearly explain why they began. Narratives […]

Categories
communication

Arguing a Point: the Cost of Partisan Differential

Contemporary political partisanship is commonly perceived as noise, conflict, or moral failure, rather than as a structural dynamic. Within that same environment, some actors benefit from it because the system rewards the conversion of difference into attention, status, or power, creating incentives for intensification. Structurally, partisanship functions less as a disagreement to be resolved than […]

Categories
communication

Dissent: Amplifying Signals

A basic rule of public communication is that attention is not a side effect; it is the medium itself. Attempts to suppress a message therefore carry a predictable risk: suppression becomes the story. In Canberra, police seized posters from the window of a local café and bar following a complaint and temporarily closed the venue […]