A spider’s book lungs pack an immense surface for exchange into a tiny space. Across lungs, brains, cells and information, the same principle recurs: internal structure multiplies what a finite system can do.
Tag: complex systems
Counter-disinformation has a structural problem: engaging a message often helps keep it alive. While this is generally unsurprising dynamical behaviour, it remains widely misunderstood.
A civilisation builds systems to solve its problems, then discovers that the systems have become the problems, while its dependence upon them has made their continuity deeply problematic.
Ideology is what happens when a way of seeing the world becomes part of the world itself, shaping not only what we believe, but what becomes easier to believe next.
Meaning repeats because recurrence builds structure, and structure influences what follows. History rhymes for much the same reason.
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.
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.
Categories
pity the children
A healthy society expects children to become adults. An unhealthy one encourages adults to remain immature.
Categories
harmonic communication
Communication persists not by preserving messages, but because each exchange reshapes the system that makes further exchange possible.
Categories
redesigning the global economy
The greatest trick concentrated capitalism ever pulled was convincing the world that its own most destructive tendencies belonged exclusively to communism.
Institutions rarely fail because they cannot recognise problems. They fail because recognising problems is not the same as escaping the conditions that reproduce them.
Daedelus Kite 