Categories
cybernetics

Everybody Knows The Game is Rigged: Why Social Systems Keep Reproducing the Same Outcomes

A rigged game constrains probabilities; it does not determine every outcome.

Categories
Philosophy

Ixion’s Wheel: Technology and the Machinery of No Return

Technology keeps solving the problems technology creates, tightening our dependence on machinery whose cumulative costs keep growing and from which there is no longer any clean exit.

Categories
cybernetics

War Machine: The Technology That Conflict Builds

Conflict builds technology, technology reorganises conflict, and somewhere inside the loop every new problem becomes someone’s next investment opportunity.

Categories
cybernetics Philosophy

Why Civilisation Cannot Solve the Problems It Creates: Diary of a Madman

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.

Categories
cybernetics

The Cybernetics of School: The Stars, the Well, and the Institution

Institutions study the world remarkably well. The harder problem is that the world they are studying is also inside the building, and there is no position outside the system from which that entanglement simply disappears.

Categories
cybernetics

A Bit of a Geopolitical Pickle: The Security Trap

Every attempt to secure one part of the world changes the conditions of security for everyone else. Endlessly.

Categories
Philosophy systems

Persistence of Reality

Reality persists because nothing (and only nothing!) ever fully coincides with itself.

Categories
cybernetics

WTF

We keep telling the same stories in different ways. The faces, crises and characters change. The same tribal pattern keeps finding new forms.

Categories
cybernetics

Homelessness Is Not Simply the Absence of a Home

A home is not simply somewhere a person lives. It is somewhere from which a life can continue.

Categories
Philosophy

Triggered: The Logical Collapse of Civilisation

The machinery does not need to fail. It only needs to keep working in ways that make more of itself necessary.

Categories
politics

Meaningless Political Babble: Communication at Scale

At the limit lies bullshit: language sufficiently detached from external constraint that its capacity to provoke another cycle of response becomes more important than what it describes.

Categories
cybernetics

Time, Clocks and the Ordering of Futures: A Eulogy for Those We Will Never Know

The present is not where possibility ends. It is where an immeasurably larger field of possible futures acquires one local history.