The probable is a proper subset of the possible. Old habits die hard because viable communication preferentially reproduces patterns that make themselves more likely to recur.
Tag: collective behaviour
Disinformation does not persist because individual false claims survive. It persists because the communicative relations that make those claims meaningful continue to reproduce themselves.
Civilisations persist by continually reorganising themselves. The unanswered question is whether conflict, crisis and systemic collapse/renewal remain the principal means through which that persistence is achieved.
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how capitalism reconstructs scarcity
The institutions assigned to solve our deepest problems are sustained by these, the very relations they are unable and/or unwilling to question.
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unbalanced: political recursion
Politics is an abstraction that leverages human beings as an extraordinarily effective method of self-propagation.
Cognitive bandwidth becomes cultural destiny because the carrying capacity of technologically mediated communication systems exceeds the carrying capacity of the biological minds living inside them.
Large populations have, at various points in history, rallied behind loud, simple, certainty-projecting figures who promise restoration, strength, or clarity amid confusion, even as those same movements steadily erode the very conditions upon which stability and shared reality depend, the quiet alignment between what people say, what they do, and what the world allows to […]
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It is not about politics
Across many countries, the current wave of populism looks like a political shift. It is, but it is also something deeper: a change in how communication systems select and stabilise meaning.
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Dissent: Another War
Resistance to war is easy to respect and hard to execute, because the same communicative channels that allow objection also convert that objection into a commercially and strategically manageable signal. A manageable signal is one whose form, timing, and intensity are already accounted for by the systems that receive it. It can be measured, narrated, […]
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Wiener–Khinchin theorem
The Wiener–Khinchin theorem describes a quiet inevitability: when a system repeats itself, even imperfectly, that repetition condenses into structure. Time leaves a trace. Signals that return, echo, or correlate with their own past do not merely accumulate; they reorganise into a spectrum, a distribution of emphasis and weight. What looks like flux from within time […]
When the ambient communication system is saturated with noise, speed, and compression, ideologies that minimise internal degrees of freedom propagate more easily, not because they are robust but because they repeat cleanly. They return in recognisable form, align with their own prior expressions, and therefore hold attention. Under these conditions, order is produced less by […]
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Strange Days
What strikes me most about the current president of the United States is a strange inversion that would be almost comic if it were not so consequential. He shows little regard for the role he occupies, scant respect for the law, and no evident commitment to the country beyond what it can deliver to him […]
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