Culture, Communication, Complexity.

Tag: cognitive overload

Short-Circuit

Post author By G
Post date Jan 30, 2026
No Comments on Short-Circuit

Meaning arises and endures only because experience and symbolic encoding remain out of phase, and when technology collapses that difference into immediacy and semiotic isomorphism, thought and behaviour collapse into preordained reflex, short-circuiting cognitive voltage into volatility, simplicity, and coercive transmissibility, turning language into a direct instrument of behavioural modulation.

cybernetics

Algorithmic Censorship

Across the major platforms, something subtle but consistent is happening. Posts rise, gather momentum, then stall at almost exactly the same threshold, regardless of topic, audience, or timing. The curve flattens not because interest disappears, but because propagation is capped. This pattern repeats on LinkedIn, WordPress, X, Instagram, and beyond. Visibility has become a controlled […]

Philosophy

Stultification Tsunami

The problem is not stupidity. Stupid ideas, taken individually, are manageable. They can be argued with, filtered, contextualised, ignored, or simply outgrown. Human cultures have always contained vast quantities of nonsense and survived quite well. That is not what is new. What is new is scale. A tsunami is not dangerous because each molecule of […]

Tags AGI hype, AI hype, algorithmic amplification, algorithmic governance, ambient stupidity, attention as power, attention economy, authoritarian drift, automation bias, catastrophic risk, civilizational risk, cognitive overload, cognitive stultification, collapse dynamics, collective cognition, collective stupidity, communication systems, complex systems, control and drift, coordination collapse, coordination failure, cultural phase shift, cybernetics, data poisoning, decision automation, disinformation campaigns, doomscrolling, engagement farming, entropic diffusion, entropy and information, epistemic crisis, epistemic pollution, externalities, feedback loops, field intelligence, global interdependence, herd cognition, high-velocity narratives, identity politics spiral, information hazard, information tsunami, institutional capture, jargon collapse, language networks, learned helplessness, linguistic entropy, LLM hallucinations, low-friction discourse, manufactured consent, manufactured stupidity, memetic warfare, model collapse, moral panic cycles, network effects, normalization of deviance, outrage machine, planetary scale systems, platform capitalism, post-truth politics, propaganda loops, reality distortion field, relational intelligence, runaway dynamics, second-order cybernetics, semantic drift, Shannon entropy, social media addiction, spectacle politics, superintelligence myth, sycophantic AI, synthetic consensus, systemic-fragility, systems theory, technocratic governance, there is no outside, tribal polarization, trust collapse, tsunami of dumb, unpayable costs, viral misinformation

language

Symbolic Traffic

Language is a game in which winning, or apparent success, is characterised, celebrated, and sustained by the relational value of tokens within it. What actually wins is the communication system itself. Human projects, without exception, are functions of belief within language, of language. Success is the generation of more language. Wealth, politics, and sociocultural dominance […]