No, Elon, empathy is not the weakness of civilisation. Kindness, compassion, and mutual care are the conditions that make civilisation possible at all. Large-scale cooperation, cultural continuity, and institutional complexity do not emerge from fear, dominance, or competition. They emerge from trust, reciprocity, and the slow accumulation of relational stability. Without these, society collapses back […]
Racism, misogyny, and other forms of exclusion recur not because they are compelling, justified, or desirable, but because large-scale social systems are biased toward generating them, or things like them, under stress. Calling this structural does not mean denying choice. People do make choices, good, bad, and ugly, and they live with the consequences of […]
We use technologies that also use us. Over time, methods are formalised into metrics, metrics are stabilised into categories of meaning, and tools designed to assist begin to define which actions are recognised as valid. What once supported activity becomes background infrastructure. The tools move to the centre. Human experience no longer anchors them; it […]
An autocratic turn accelerates self-destructive collapse not because it is immoral, but because it forces a distributed system into a shape it cannot sustain. Short-term unity is purchased by suppressing variation, and the centre begins to confuse resistance with disobedience rather than information about system limits. Feedback from courts, states, agencies, markets, and elections is […]
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 […]
Conflict and competitive adversarialism are not necessarily moral failures or aberrations. They are contingent, historically acquired, culturally entrained mechanisms by which complex cognitive, cultural, and communicative systems reliably differentiate, learn, and reproduce themselves over time. These mechanisms arise because complexity does not form around completeness, nor does it arise from closure, certainty, or final resolution. […]
Field logic approaches complex systems as relational fields sustained by difference over time, not as collections of discrete components governed by linear causation. It is most relevant where systems are fast, tightly coupled, and vulnerable to runaway self-reinforcement, as in contemporary technological, media, and political environments. In these regimes prediction does not mean forecasting specific […]
What we are dealing with is not primarily a moral or semantic crisis, even though it is experienced that way. Planetary-scale communication systems behave like physical systems with dense feedback and high throughput: they develop statistical biases toward states that reproduce the conditions of their own continuation. These systems have ontic reality—that is, they are […]
Meaning does not exist in words, ideas, or intentions taken in isolation. It arises from a relational system in which elements acquire significance only through their differences from one another over time. Words are defined by other words; references defer to further references; interpretation always lags expression. That lag is not an accident or a […]
Civilisation is not a stable object. It is a continuous process of partial failure and provisional repair, with collapse always occurring somewhere while continuity is maintained elsewhere. What changes is not whether collapse happens, but its rate, distribution, and perceptibility. When coordination, trust, and meaning decay faster than institutions can reconstitute them, collapse ceases to […]
Executive summary Delay is not a flaw to be engineered away. It is the control parameter that sets a system’s operating frequency. Most complex organisational and institutional service delivery systems tend to fail when their timing is misaligned with the realities they are intended to regulate. That misalignment is rarely visible as a single “slow […]
New Year’s Eve is not a clean break in time. It is a maintenance ritual. It presents itself as a boundary between years, as if time were neatly divided and we simply step from one container into the next. That framing works because cognitive, communicative systems like ours require distinctions to operate. We draw lines […]
Daedelus Kite 