Culture, Communication, Complexity.

Tag: collective cognition

Philosophy of Language

My position is that the most consequential features of language, meaning, and coordination cannot be exhaustively defined without being distorted, and that this is a structural necessity rather than a theoretical shortcoming. Certain terms must be taken as primitive, not out of convenience, but because definition is itself a secondary operation, already dependent on relational […]

cybernetics

Sensemaking in Organisations

Post author By G
Post date Jan 10, 2026
No Comments on Sensemaking in Organisations

Karl Weick’s Sensemaking in Organizations emerged from a dissatisfaction with how organisations were typically described: as decision machines, information processors, or rational planners. Weick’s work cut against that grain. Drawing on psychology, sociology, and organisational studies, he focused instead on how people inside organisations actually come to understand what they are doing, usually after they […]

Tags action and interpretation, administrative decision making, algorithmic decision systems, attention management, authority and compliance, automation and governance, brittle institutions, bureaucratic rationality, bureaucratic systems, causality in social systems, collective cognition, communication in organizations, complex adaptive organizations, compression of feedback loops, coordination versus adaptability, crisis management systems, cybernetics and organizations, decision cycles, delay in organizations, digital bureaucracy, entropy in organizational systems, feedback and control, governance systems, high reliability organizations, information overload, institutional behavior, knowledge management limits, language and administration, logic of coordination, managerial ideology, media ecology in institutions, operational coherence, operational resilience, operational tempo, organizational control, organizational dynamics, organizational fragility, organizational learning failure, organizational sensemaking, philosophy of action, platform organizations, policy implementation, political organizations, political philosophy of institutions, procedural language, psychology of organizations, public sector management, retrospective meaning, signal and reception, structural realism in organizations, system design principles, systemic failure modes, systems theory in management, technocratic governance, technological acceleration, temporal structure of decision making, uncertainty management

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

communication

2026: The Stupid is Coming

Post author By G
Post date Dec 30, 2025
No Comments on 2026: The Stupid is Coming

The communicative field—call it language, media, platforms, signalling systems, whatever—does not sit outside us. It evolves through us, as us. What most people experience as agency, originality, or personal control is largely a selection effect inside a much larger communicative metabolism. We choose from it, we modulate it slightly, but the directionality is not ours. […]