Civilisation is not a stable object. It is a continuous process of partial failure and provisional repair, with collapse always occurring somewhere while continuity is maintained elsewhere. What changes is not whether collapse happens, but its rate, distribution, and perceptibility. When coordination, trust, and meaning decay faster than institutions can reconstitute them, collapse ceases to […]
Power dresses itself in tailored certainty, but it runs on the same brittle circuits as the rest of us. The billionaires, the opportunists, the half-literate fist-pumpers who mistake grievance for strategy — they’re just another jittery species dancing under a star that occasionally throws a Carrington-class mood swing. One electromagnetic hiccup, and every boast, every […]
Stupidity is not the absence of intelligence. It is what remains when intelligence has no traction. At planetary scale, selection pressure favours whatever travels fastest through the channels of attention, capital, and command. Systems built to maximise replication discover that nuance is drag and understanding is latency. Thought requires time; stupidity is instantaneous. In a […]
Shark skin is a sheet of teeth: millimetre-scale placoid denticles, each with an enamel crown, dentine core and pulp cavity, rooted in the dermis and oriented from nose to tail so that one way feels smooth and the other rasps like sandpaper. In fast swimmers such as the shortfin mako Isurus oxyrinchus and other pelagic […]
Indifference to fact has hardened into a governing force. What confronts us now is not simply ambition or ideology, but a defensive ignorance that elevates its own stultifying certainty above evidence, coherence, and consequence. Civilisations do not break under hidden schemes; they erode when ordinary ignorance and defensively hypersensitive belief scale beyond correction, when whole […]
Civilisation was never meant to run on panic, yet that is the rhythm we’ve drifted into. The public story insists we are building a future, but the machinery underneath tells a different tale — one of shortening time-horizons, defensive accumulation, and a cultural field tuned to performance rather than survival. The great systems of finance, […]
Language is both the tool and the trap. We imagine ourselves steering it toward justice, order, or truth, yet language is steering us toward whatever best ensures its own survival. Our systems—legal, political, bureaucratic, technological—do not simply operate in language; they operate for it. Every new term, policy, and narrative strengthens the structures of description […]
Civilisation runs on language. Every system we build—laws, markets, machines, minds—depends on describing the world in order to act within it. Yet the world always moves first. The act of catching up is not a flaw but the essence of thought: meaning arises in pursuit, not possession. The delay—between what is and what can be […]
Honesty or extinction. That’s the choice. Climate change isn’t a crisis outside us—it’s the mirror of everything we’ve built. Our systems, proud and precise, are designed to defend their own definitions. Governments, universities, corporations—all fluent in continuity, allergic to contradiction. They confuse repetition with stability, and stability with survival. But the planet doesn’t care for […]
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 […]
We come together not to dress the truth in lace, but to speak plainly: humanity had within it sparks, flashes, even storms of brilliance. The rhythm of its thought pulsed in breaths both shallow and profound—an inhalation of vision, an exhalation of confusion. Yet in ensemble, the cadence collapsed. What was sharp in one mind […]
Wars without end, from Iraq to Ukraine, consume generations while manufacturing weapons and enemies in equal measure. Economies strip forests, poison rivers, and churn out disposable goods, all in the name of growth that hollows out the future. Technologies arrive draped in the promise of connection yet leave populations isolated, profiled, and monetised; social media […]
Daedelus Kite 