Human behaviour gathers around centres that never quite appear. We move toward meanings that seem solid, yet their solidity comes from the very motion that tries to reach them. The closer we look, the more the “centre” dissolves into the relations that formed it, leaving us oriented by something that exists only as a pattern […]
Invisible disability exposes a structural mismatch between experience and assessment. Institutions rely on narrow snapshots — fixed criteria, discrete checkboxes, procedural thresholds — to determine what counts as relevant evidence. These frames compress complexity into a form legible to an administrative workflow, but the compression also screens out the fluctuating cognitive load, episodic variation, and […]
The canonical irony of institutional epistemology is that once an organisation derives its coherence from misunderstanding, that misunderstanding becomes its stabilising feedback loop. In cybernetic terms, the error signal ceases to correct deviation and instead sustains it—control reorganises itself around dysfunction. The system maintains identity not through adaptation, but through the ritual preservation of its […]
Government services fail not only because of underfunding, incompetence, or political neglect. They fail because of a structural dynamic baked into the way bureaucracies sustain themselves. Take social support systems. The stated function is simple: provide assistance to people who’ve lost their jobs until they can find another. But the actual functioning diverges. The machinery […]
Bureaucracy weaponizes stupidity and makes a virtue of it’s inept, yet profitable, consequence.
Institutions are adept at naming their own failures but structurally incapable of addressing them. The bureaucratic cycle rewards discussion, reports, committees, and procedures that extend problems rather than resolve them. What gets called “management” is often the art of sustaining a tolerable stalemate, a perpetual negotiation that keeps the machinery alive without meaningfully engaging the […]
If you think politics is the solution to a world deeply problematised by entropic gradients of political turbulence, you’re either an idiot or you’re evil. Politics doesn’t solve problems, it feeds on them. It sustains itself by displacement — shuffling costs, hiding contradictions, weaponising blame. Nothing fundamental ever changes because the system isn’t built to […]
Bureaucracy is a dissipative structure, built not to solve problems but to metabolise them. Flows of energy, information, and compliance pass through its channels, and in passing they feed its continuity. The structure consumes instability and recycles it as order, but only order of its own kind—recursive loops of policy, paperwork, and oversight. Like a […]
The (unwitting) yet structural necessity of unemployment in a self-preserving system. Long-term unemployment in Australia isn’t just a policy oversight—it’s a structural feature. Governments cycle through new programs, slogans, and initiatives, but the underlying machinery remains unchanged. It isn’t designed to solve the problem; it’s designed to administer it. To be more precise: the failure […]
The operational (as regulatory) constraints required to self-propagate a money machine and business or community and ecology of institutional organisation are also the primary braking mechanisms of an inertia that is so profound and so deeply infused within the symbolic, socioaffective and cultural systems we inhabit, that we are as commonly unable to perceive this […]
Deterministic assumptions have a tendency to reproduce the kinds of dissonance for which those assumptions are best suited to further negotiate; bureaucracies thrive in precisely this way. This is a question as of how (and perhaps why) systems tend to abstract models of their components that ever so slightly misrepresent those parts in ways that, […]
A recent family bereavement has left me with no less questions than ever as to the essence of this human experience we all share but has necessarily shaped the form and flow as qualitative flavour of inquiry. The salience in my cartography of grief has been to discover – or, perhaps, to rediscover – that […]
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