Culture, Communication, Complexity.

Tag: Australian universities

institutional failure

You cannot make the world better by changing who occupies positions of power while leaving the structure of power itself, and the machinery rewarding its behaviour, intact.

Tags academic culture, academic institutions, administrative culture, ANU, Australian universities, bureaucracy, complex systems, Complexity, cultural politics, cybernetics, diversity and inclusion, epistemic failure, ethics, governance, governance-failure, hierarchy, higher education, institutional accountability, institutional blindness, institutional critique, institutional decay, institutional failure, institutional legitimacy, institutional reflexivity, institutional self preservation, leadership culture, managerialism, moral performance, moral vocabulary, organisational dysfunction, organisational entropy, organisational learning, organisational pathology, power and control, power structures, public administration, recursive systems, representation, School of Cybernetics, social justice, social systems, strategic failure, structural contradiction, structural reform, structural transformation, symbolic action, symbolic substitution, systemic reform, systemic self-analysis, systems and power, systems theory, systems thinking, universities, university bureaucracy

cybernetics

Cybernetics: Good Intentions, Bad Vibes

Post author By G
Post date Jan 27, 2026
No Comments on Cybernetics: Good Intentions, Bad Vibes

The language of the school was expansive: culture, power, technology, ethics, ecology, gender, indigeneity, diversity, human experience, systems, responsibility, complexity. It spoke fluently about uncertainty, fragility, and care. It marketed itself as a space for deep reflection on and constructive engagement with how technological systems were and are reshaping civilisation. But in one all-staff meeting, […]

Tags academic publishing, adversarial politics, aesthetic critique, AI slop, ANU, Australian universities, biodiversity, Canberra, climate and governance, communication systems, complexity theory, corporate power, cultural politics, cybernetics, diversity discourse, epistemic uncertainty, ethics and technology, feedback loops, field logic, forests and ecology, gender and culture, governance, human experience, indigeneity and culture, institutional culture, knowledge institutions, language and meaning, learning and recovery, legitimacy economy, media ecology, metabolic systems, natural systems, op-ed, organizational continuity, organizational metabolism, post-truth systems, power dynamics, public intellectualism, recursive power, resilience, stroke recovery, structural critique, system blindness, systemic capture, systems ecology, systems thinking, technocracy, technological leviathan, truth and doubt, unintended consequences, wildlife symbolism