Categories
cybernetics

Institutional Epistemology

The canonical irony of institutional epistemology is that once an organisation derives its coherence from misunderstanding, that misunderstanding becomes its stabilising feedback loop. In cybernetic terms, the error signal ceases to correct deviation and instead sustains it—control reorganises itself around dysfunction. The system maintains identity not through adaptation, but through the ritual preservation of its […]

Categories
cybernetics

Norbert Wiener, Redux

In communicative systems, coherence does not arise from shared meaning but from rhythmic alignment. Spectral coupling describes this alignment across frequencies—how patterns of oscillation, delay, and amplitude between subsystems interact to produce stability or distortion. It is not the transmission of messages but the entrainment of their timing and resonance. Within a field logic perspective, […]

Categories
cybernetics

Lattice

Meaning can be understood as relational invariance under transformation. In mathematics, invariance is what stays the same when everything else changes. In physics, such stability gives rise to conservation laws — momentum from translational symmetry, energy from temporal symmetry. Language behaves the same way: its meaning persists not through fixed definitions but through relationships that […]

Categories
cybernetics

Noise

The atmosphere of American politics now resembles a dense fog of ideological noise. What registers as outrage, conviction or disgust is less the product of reasoned belief than the mechanics of replication: the simplest, most virulent signals race ahead of nuance. Words once tethered to meaning drift as tokens in a saturated field, their resonance […]

Categories
cybernetics

Stochastic Transmission of Volatile Language

Language drifts as matter drifts: clustering, folding, condensing into nodes of repetition that pass for meaning. It is not even significant what the transmission medium is, because entropy finds its own channels; in the end, the medium is us—our beliefs, our institutions, our most sacrosanct assumptions. Politically this volatility is evident, but volatility is precisely […]

Categories
cybernetics

Social Media: Entropic Confusion

When rolling two six-sided dice, the number seven is most likely not because it is special, but because probability clusters toward the middle. Out of 36 possible combinations, six add to seven, more than any other sum. This is entropy in miniature: the system naturally drifts toward its centre, not by design or meaning, but […]

Categories
cybernetics

The Mirage of AI Wealth

Artificial intelligence is widely proclaimed as a generator of new wealth. The suggestion is that models trained on large datasets, coupled with computational scale, will deliver prosperity by sheer force of information processing. Yet this claim collapses under even modest scrutiny. Wealth cannot be summoned into being by wordplay, nor does it arise automatically from […]

Categories
Philosophy

Regulating Social Media

Regulation of social media is sold as public hygiene but functions more like selective pruning in a forest that no one understands. Bureaucracies and their corporate partners operate under a control logic shaped by short-term optics rather than systemic insight. In Australia, as elsewhere, the expertise required to manage such vast, self-amplifying communication networks barely […]

Categories
Philosophy

Underlings

Corporate technology profits are rarely clean margins extracted from neutral ground; they are anchored in offset risk. Cybersecurity vulnerabilities, compromised personal data, algorithmic misclassifications, even the dependence of daily life on opaque infrastructures—all of these constitute the ground on which profit is made. The value extracted is not merely from the technology itself but from […]

Categories
politics

Bingo

Democracy is often assumed to be more resilient than it is. What is becoming clear in the United States is that its very openness—the freedoms of speech, assembly, and communication—provide the leverage points through which anti-democratic forces operate. If democratic systems can be bent or flipped using relatively low energy—disinformation campaigns, procedural manipulation, networked mobilization—then […]

Categories
Philosophy

Climate Change and the Logic of Holism

Climate change resists treatment as a set of isolated variables. It is not reducible to emissions inventories, technological substitutions, or regional agreements. It is a whole system phenomenon, where every action is bound into the larger field, and every tension is a projection of the system itself. The key property is not in the fragments […]

Categories
Philosophy

Conflict

Conflict is not an aberration but a structural tension. It is woven into the fabric of social and economic life, a dynamic that is not merely tolerated but institutionalized. Markets thrive on competition, politics depends on opposition, education sorts by difference, and law enforcement revolves around an endless cycle of pursuit and evasion. The game […]