Tag: complex adaptive systems

Productive Misanthropy

Service delivery systems must model the environments they act within. This is unavoidable. Eligibility rules, risk categories, performance metrics, and compliance frameworks are all abstractions that allow action under constraint. The model is not the world. It is an interface that reduces complexity to something administrable. Over time, however, the interface acquires weight. The abstraction […]

Tags accountability regimes, activation policy, ADM oversight, administrative burden, administrative error, administrative exhaustion, administrative violence, adverse outcomes reproduction, algorithmic governance, appeals system, APS governance, ashby law, audit and assurance, audit culture, audit logs, australian public administration, automated decision making, backlog dynamics, benefits navigation, bureaucratic drift, campbell law, carceral throughput, care coordination failure, case load pressure, case processing, centrelink processes, churn management, commonwealth integrity, comparative public policy, complex adaptive systems, complexity informed governance, compliance complexity, compliance theatre, consultancy dependence, control systems, cost shifting, cybernetics in policy, debt recovery algorithms, digital by default services, digital identity, dignity in service delivery, disability services, documentation requirements, downstream harm, eligibility criteria, entropy displacement, epistemic closure, explainability, feedback loops, frontline discretion, general systems theory, goodhart law, governance-failure, government accountability australia, health system navigation, high dimensional systems, human centred design, identity verification burden, incentive design, income averaging, inequality reproduction, information asymmetry, institutional complexity, institutional self maintenance, integrated services, jobseeker compliance, justice system churn, knowledge hierarchies, KPI gaming, legibility politics, marginalisation dynamics, metric fixation, model provisionality, model reality mismatch, mutual obligation, mygov access, NDIS administration, non take up, operational efficiency traps, organisational learning, organisational legitimacy, payment suspension, performance reporting, performance targets, policy compliance burden, policy framework inertia, policy humility, policy implementation gap, policy modelling, poverty administration, procedural churn, procedural denial, procedural friction, procedural justice, procedural opacity, procurement incentives, productive misanthropy, provisional metrics, public accountability, public sector ethics, public sector reform, public value, queue management, rationing by process, recidivism cycle, recipient experience, regulation lived experience, regulatory systems, representational assumptions, requisite variety, review tribunals, risk management culture, risk scoring, ritualised validation, robodebt, robodebt royal commission, sanctions regime, sensemaking organisations, service delivery systems, service design, service recipient entropy, services australia, services australia call centre, social determinants of health, social protection systems, social welfare policy, state simplification, statistical governance, street level bureaucracy, system stability versus success, systems dynamics, systems thinking, target culture, transparency, trauma informed services, triage systems, trust in institutions, unemployment services, welfare administration, welfare conditionality, workforce australia

cybernetics

On the Structural Limits of Political Language

Post author By G
Post date Jan 10, 2026
No Comments on On the Structural Limits of Political Language

Victor Klemperer’s The Language of the Third Reich was written under conditions that were materially, professionally, and existentially constraining. As a Jewish academic in Nazi Germany, he was excluded from public life, subject to surveillance, and deprived of institutional protection. The book did not emerge as a theoretical project but as a record: observations accumulated […]

Tags administrative language, algorithmic language, attention economy, authoritarian language structures, authority and compliance, automatic uptake, boundaries and systems, brittle systems, bureaucratic discourse, causal structures in communication, coherence versus adaptability, collapse dynamics, collective identity formation, communication systems, complex adaptive systems, conflict semiotics, control and coordination, crisis communication, cybernetics, definitional circularity, delay and meaning, differentiation and identity, displacement of uncertainty, entropy in social systems, feedback loops, field logic, frequency domain thinking, ideology and language, language and governance, language and stability, language and violence, language under pressure, linguistic alignment, logic and structure, managed uncertainty, meaning and causality, media ecology, non-coincidence principle, organizational sensemaking, philosophy of language, philosophy-of-systems, platform governance, political communication dynamics, political fragility, political language analysis, political philosophy, post-linguistic semiotics, pre-interpreted language, pre-symbolic meaning, propaganda mechanisms, psychological dissonance, psychology of certainty, recursive systems, reflexive interpretation, self-reference in language, semantic compression, semantic degradation, semiotics and power, signal and reception, structural entropy, structural instability, structural realism, system dynamics, system environment distinction, systems theory, technological mediation, temporal structure of meaning, tribal cognition, uncertainty and ambiguity, utterance and interpretation, war and language

cybernetics

Field Logic and Semiotics

Post author By G
Post date Jan 10, 2026
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This essay advances a limited but precise claim: meaning in communicative systems depends on structured delay, and that delay is constitutive of causal relations rather than incidental to them. Where there is a point of emission and a point of reception, the signal that passes between them is not merely a connector. It participates in […]

Tags algorithmic governance, attention economy, authoritarian language, boundaries and systems, causality in politics, communication collapse, communication fields, communication systems, complex adaptive systems, conflict semiotics, control and coordination, control society, coordination vs adaptability, crisis governance, cybernetics, delay theory, democratic fragility, differentiation theory, entropy and governance, environment and system, feedback loops, field logic, identity and difference, ideology and language, information and power, institutional dynamics, language and violence, language under pressure, meaning and causality, meaning production, media ecology, non-coincidence, organizational theory, phase difference, platform politics, policy communication, political acceleration, political communication, political entropy, political systems analysis, political theory, post-linguistic semiotics, power and meaning, pre-symbolic meaning, propaganda dynamics, recursive systems, self-reference, semantic compression, semantic degradation, semiotics, sign theory, signal and receiver, signal propagation, strategic communication, structural entropy, structured delay, systems collapse, systems theory, technocracy critique, uncertainty displacement, war and language, war systems analysis

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 […]

Psychology

Vanishing Point: Self-ish

The self is commonly understood as something one has: a centre of experience, a point of view, a continuous “me” that persists through time. Psychological models tend to formalise this intuition by treating the self as a representational structure—narrative continuity, minimal experiential core, or predictive model—through which coherence can be maintained. This move is not […]

Tags absence, absent centre, authentication protocols, boundary-making, coherence without closure, communication systems, complex adaptive systems, coordinate systems, cybersecurity as coordination, distributed self, emptiness, entropy and coherence, field logic, i, identity, identity as process, identity credentials, identity theft, inside outside dissolution, institutional stabilisation, interoperability, language and meaning, meaning, meaning is elsewhere, non-orientable topology, perspective and projection, phase lag and control, recursion feedback loop, recursive self-reference, relational identity, representation and stability, representation language, self, self and environment, semantic field, stability through distinction, systems theory, systems-theoretical self, technology, uncertainty as condition, vanishing point

Alien Anthropology Philosophy

Playing the Long-Game of Human Civilisation

Post author By G
Post date Aug 11, 2019
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The catastrophic entropy of a currently most-probable future is not the only available solution in the possibility-space of all emergent and adaptive human planetary civilisations.

Philosophy

Cultivating Innovation

Sociological, psychological and economic systems are poorly optimised to cultivate or acknowledge the forms of innovation and creative thinking that their existence in the world depends upon.

Tags complex adaptive systems, Complexity, concepts, conceptual, culture, economy, intelligence, Psychology, wisdom