Tag: attention economy

Populism

Post author By G
Post date Jan 6, 2026
No Comments on Populism

What we are dealing with is not primarily a moral or semantic crisis, even though it is experienced that way. Planetary-scale communication systems behave like physical systems with dense feedback and high throughput: they develop statistical biases toward states that reproduce the conditions of their own continuation. These systems have ontic reality—that is, they are […]

history

Stranger Kings

Post author By G
Post date Jan 2, 2026
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Evil did not arrive with a plan. It arrived pre-installed, the natural orientation of relationally networked complexity at scale, settling into low-energy states and the familiar attractors of corruption, populism, and conflict. There are puppet-masters and greedy, demonic characters involved, certainly, but even they are mostly riding that prebuilt wave. They do not invent the […]

cybernetics

What Is New Year’s Eve?

New Year’s Eve is not a clean break in time. It is a maintenance ritual. It presents itself as a boundary between years, as if time were neatly divided and we simply step from one container into the next. That framing works because cognitive, communicative systems like ours require distinctions to operate. We draw lines […]

Philosophy

2026 Technocracy: More Control, Less Comprehension

Post author By G
Post date Dec 31, 2025
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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 […]

Tags 2026, AI and power, AI governance, AI risks, algorithmic governance, algorithmic power, Artificial Intelligence, attention economy, authoritarian acceleration, authoritarianism, choice architecture, civilisational collapse, cognitive capture, collapse dynamics, complexity and governance, consequence deferral, control society, encoded choice, entropy, entropy and power, field logic, future collapse, future of humanity, global instability, late capitalism, loss of agency, mass psychosis, oscillatory instability, phase transition, platform capitalism, probability collapse, socio-technical systems, surveillance capitalism, systemic risk, systems collapse, systems theory, technocracy, technological determinism, technology and society

Psychology

Intelligence, Lost

There is a specific psychological trap that closes once people believe intelligence has been defined. Not improved, not approximated, not extended—but captured. Once intelligence is perceived as a solved object, externalised and perfected elsewhere (in systems, institutions, or machines), the individual cognitive posture changes in a very particular way: curiosity collapses into compliance. This is […]

Tags AGI hype, AI hype, answer culture, anti-curiosity dynamics, attention economy, authority transfer, automation bias, belief hardening, certainty addiction, civilisational cognition, cognitive atrophy, cognitive offloading, cognitive surrender, collective intelligence decline, communication systems, complex systems, compliance over cognition, curiosity collapse, definition trap, entropy and cognition, epistemic authority, epistemic closure, epistemic complacency, epistemic passivity, epistemic risk, field intelligence, finality trap, hype and cognition, illusion of completion, intellectual dependency, intelligence as solved problem, knowledge fetishism, language and cognition, learned helplessness, loss of epistemic tension, metacognition failure, normalisation of stupidity, outsourced thinking, post-critical cognition, psychology of belief, psychology of intelligence, superintelligence myth, synthetic consensus, systems psychology, technocratic authority, thinking as retrieval

Philosophy

Stultification Tsunami

The problem is not stupidity. Stupid ideas, taken individually, are manageable. They can be argued with, filtered, contextualised, ignored, or simply outgrown. Human cultures have always contained vast quantities of nonsense and survived quite well. That is not what is new. What is new is scale. A tsunami is not dangerous because each molecule of […]

Tags AGI hype, AI hype, algorithmic amplification, algorithmic governance, ambient stupidity, attention as power, attention economy, authoritarian drift, automation bias, catastrophic risk, civilizational risk, cognitive overload, cognitive stultification, collapse dynamics, collective cognition, collective stupidity, communication systems, complex systems, control and drift, coordination collapse, coordination failure, cultural phase shift, cybernetics, data poisoning, decision automation, disinformation campaigns, doomscrolling, engagement farming, entropic diffusion, entropy and information, epistemic crisis, epistemic pollution, externalities, feedback loops, field intelligence, global interdependence, herd cognition, high-velocity narratives, identity politics spiral, information hazard, information tsunami, institutional capture, jargon collapse, language networks, learned helplessness, linguistic entropy, LLM hallucinations, low-friction discourse, manufactured consent, manufactured stupidity, memetic warfare, model collapse, moral panic cycles, network effects, normalization of deviance, outrage machine, planetary scale systems, platform capitalism, post-truth politics, propaganda loops, reality distortion field, relational intelligence, runaway dynamics, second-order cybernetics, semantic drift, Shannon entropy, social media addiction, spectacle politics, superintelligence myth, sycophantic AI, synthetic consensus, systemic-fragility, systems theory, technocratic governance, there is no outside, tribal polarization, trust collapse, tsunami of dumb, unpayable costs, viral misinformation

communication

2026: The Stupid is Coming

Post author By G
Post date Dec 30, 2025
No Comments on 2026: The Stupid is Coming

The communicative field—call it language, media, platforms, signalling systems, whatever—does not sit outside us. It evolves through us, as us. What most people experience as agency, originality, or personal control is largely a selection effect inside a much larger communicative metabolism. We choose from it, we modulate it slightly, but the directionality is not ours. […]

language

Symbolic Traffic

Language is a game in which winning, or apparent success, is characterised, celebrated, and sustained by the relational value of tokens within it. What actually wins is the communication system itself. Human projects, without exception, are functions of belief within language, of language. Success is the generation of more language. Wealth, politics, and sociocultural dominance […]

Philosophy

Planetary Leadership Crisis

Post author By G
Post date Dec 29, 2025
No Comments on Planetary Leadership Crisis

We are not simply, or only, facing a crisis of leadership or values. We are facing a coordination failure at planetary scale, driven by technologies and institutions that reward domination, speed, and spectacle while quietly eroding the conditions that make intelligence, civilisation, and continuity possible at all. This is not a morality play. It is […]

politics

Logical Failure

Post author By G
Post date Dec 26, 2025
1 Comment on Logical Failure

It is possible to speak about what is often labelled fascism without centring moral judgement, and instead treat it as a systemic configuration whose failure follows from structural incompatibility rather than ethical evaluation. Moral objections may be justified, but they are not what makes this form unsustainable. The failure arises from how such a configuration […]

cybernetics

Global Field Logic

Applying field logic to the global socio-economy means treating politics not as the source of direction but as a surface articulation of deeper structural dynamics. By field logic, I mean understanding social, economic, and technological systems as continuous relational environments that shape what can stabilise, propagate, or decay before intention, belief, or ideology come into […]

Tags attention economy, cascading failure, communication systems, complexity theory, edge of chaos, emergence, entropy dynamics, field logic, global socio economy, governance limits, harmonic structure, meaning and continuity, political affect, self-propagation, structural instability, systemic collapse

Philosophy

Hollow States

Post author By G
Post date Dec 26, 2025
No Comments on Hollow States

No complex system is complete, and none ever settles into final coherence. It persists by operating near its own failure modes, always collapsing toward equilibrium without arriving there. This condition is not exceptional; it is constitutive. Collapse is not what ends systems, but what allows them to reproduce themselves. Systems endure by continuously redistributing error, […]