Attempts to stabilise volatile systems by force tend to amplify and exacerbate the volatility they were intended to contain. Sons of Anarchy staged this in miniature: each shortcut, retaliation, or opportunistic scheme deepened the instability that provoked it. The club kept solving yesterday’s damage with tomorrow’s disaster because the logic driving their decisions never changed. […]
The more precisely a technological system is engineered—its algorithms finely tuned, its processes deeply automated, its data flows tightly orchestrated—the more space is created for chaotic ambiguity to hide in the seams. In social media, for instance, the apparatus of engagement-metrics, feed-ranking, and viral amplification claim clarity and intent, yet they spawn unpredictable collective behaviour: […]
Autonomous technological systems now routinely adjust themselves through internal feedback: machine-learning pipelines that retrain on their own outputs, trading algorithms that react to price movements they partly create, recommendation systems that optimise engagement based on the behaviours they induce. Human input still exists, but it is sampled as data, not held as authority. Governance happens […]
Language drifts as matter drifts: clustering, folding, condensing into nodes of repetition that pass for meaning. It is not even significant what the transmission medium is, because entropy finds its own channels; in the end, the medium is us—our beliefs, our institutions, our most sacrosanct assumptions. Politically this volatility is evident, but volatility is precisely […]
When rolling two six-sided dice, the number seven is most likely not because it is special, but because probability clusters toward the middle. Out of 36 possible combinations, six add to seven, more than any other sum. This is entropy in miniature: the system naturally drifts toward its centre, not by design or meaning, but […]
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 […]
Democracy is often assumed to be more resilient than it is. What is becoming clear in the United States is that its very openness—the freedoms of speech, assembly, and communication—provide the leverage points through which anti-democratic forces operate. If democratic systems can be bent or flipped using relatively low energy—disinformation campaigns, procedural manipulation, networked mobilization—then […]
Conflict is not an aberration but a structural tension. It is woven into the fabric of social and economic life, a dynamic that is not merely tolerated but institutionalized. Markets thrive on competition, politics depends on opposition, education sorts by difference, and law enforcement revolves around an endless cycle of pursuit and evasion. The game […]
Technology operates as an engine of sociotechnical addiction not only because of the dopamine loops it inhabits but because of the recursive deficit embedded in every function it provides. Each convenience extracts slightly more than it gives back, yet disguises this loss through displacement: the cost is shifted outward, onto others, into the future, or […]
The world does not reward what it most urgently needs. Peace, wisdom, unity, compassion, foresight—these qualities generate too little turbulence to capture bandwidth in networks tuned to maximize throughput. Conflict, by contrast, multiplies combinations of noise, feeding the entropic appetite of systems that scale dissonance into profit. The result is a Gordian knot: we require […]
To know how systems work—minds, technologies, institutions—is to stand at a vantage where the contours of failure are obvious. You see the repeating loops, the patterned insistence on precedent masquerading as wisdom, the reflexive grasp for what was done before as though it could still suffice. Awareness here does not grant influence; it only exposes […]
Generative AI systems provide an interface to the near-unbounded representational, referential and/or relationally networked complexity of ourselves, as historical data and informational or logical abstraction. We struggle cognitively and linguistically with a notion that there is no simply deterministic mapping from input to output in these tools. This is not a bug or failure, it […]
Daedelus Kite 