Categories
politics

Australian Democracy: One Country, Many Ways

Australia works because it stays balanced. Its democracy is not built on simple agreement, but on the disciplined interaction between different ways of seeing the world. Labor and Liberal are not just rival teams. Together, they form the smallest political structure capable of holding a complex society together. Two sides generate debate, correction, and restraint. […]

Categories
Psychology

The Human Condition

Psychoanalysis begins with a joke that only works because it fails: the patient arrives burdened with paranoia, anxiety, and unhappiness, and the doctor replies that this is simply the human condition. (Cure denied.) The moment this is understood, the structure collapses. The consulting room becomes a mirror, not a remedy, and what it reflects is […]

Categories
Peace Philosophy

Kindness

No, Elon, empathy is not the weakness of civilisation. Kindness, compassion, and mutual care are the conditions that make civilisation possible at all. Large-scale cooperation, cultural continuity, and institutional complexity do not emerge from fear, dominance, or competition. They emerge from trust, reciprocity, and the slow accumulation of relational stability. Without these, society collapses back […]

Categories
Philosophy

Dystopian Technocracy

The system persists not because it is strong, but because responsibility for its failures is continually exported onto those with the least capacity to refuse it. Dystopian technocracy is not a future — it is the operating mode of now. Nothing is load-bearing, yet the system behaves as though its own simulations were reality. What […]

Categories
Philosophy

Ideological Ghosts

Capitalism and communism present themselves as opposites, yet both begin with the same compression: they take a complex, adaptive system and force it through one organising idea — or a narrow family of constraints — then mistake that reduction for governance and, by proxy, for reality. Market systems emphasise decentralised exchange; planned systems emphasise central […]

Categories
Philosophy

Underlings

Corporate technology profits are rarely clean margins extracted from neutral ground; they are anchored in offset risk. Cybersecurity vulnerabilities, compromised personal data, algorithmic misclassifications, even the dependence of daily life on opaque infrastructures—all of these constitute the ground on which profit is made. The value extracted is not merely from the technology itself but from […]

Categories
cybernetics technology

You are the Product

Big technology does not connect you—it consumes you. Its business model is not service but extraction. Every keystroke, every gesture, every delay in loading a page becomes a commodity. You are not the customer; you are the crop. The analogy of farming is no metaphor at all: platforms cultivate dependency as a field is tilled […]

Categories
politics

Ideological Fortresses

Political positions and ideological fortresses are grounded in the need for and dependence upon antitheses. What may be less obvious is that a communications system signal as gradient of ideological difference embodied in adversarial geopolitics is only ever reproduced in and amplified by that competition. Like the ouroboros, it feeds upon the long tail of […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Lying Flat

Context: Work is a False Idol Note: A newspaper article regarding the endemic failure of capitalism in China that is itself pay-walled and inaccessible seems suitably ironic as to leave hyper-linked here. It is interesting that this “movement” of self-propagating behavioural and information idioms or tropes might be rendered or interpreted as threatening to economic […]

Categories
Philosophy

Competitive Difference is the Optimal State of Complex Socioeconomic Systems

Context: https://youtu.be/2Uj1A9AguFs Vertical motion in this chart is a measure of the degree to which any of the organisations or entities recursively and reflexively facilitates global information system self-replication. This is precisely how complex information-processing systems function: they autonomously self-select for those components, entities and sub-systems that optimally bias for the replication of the overall […]

Categories
business Organisation Philosophy

Recursive Utility: On Learning to Learn and the Emergence of Mercenary Capitalism

Agreed, on learning to learn. Recursive utility. On the (later) observations of the benefits to that learning process of competitive socioeconomic systems, as mentioned, I partially agree. A degree of competition is healthy but, invoking a general principle of recursive utility again, when competitive adversarialism becomes a goal and an end in itself – as […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Populism, Authoritarianism and Cults of Personality

Context: The CCP’s Official Journal Falls in Line with Xi Jinping’s Cult of Personality As a more general philosophical observation agnostic of specific contexts (including -isms or persons), human beings are subject to reflexive psychological imprinting of a sort that leads us to cultivate these fantasies and fictions of triumphant great leaders as an inadvertent […]