Categories
Philosophy

Entropy is King

Entropy, and only entropy, is king. Highly ordered information systems do not rest on harmony. They are grounded in dissonance, volatility, and conflict, just as is extreme wealth sustained by the presence of its antithesis, the incoherent becoming, and always having been, the transmission medium of its inverse. This is not metaphor. It is structural. […]

Categories
cybernetics

Unfinished Systems

Large systems of power, regulation, ideology, and identity do not stabilise by winning or resolving the problems they address. They stabilise by remaining unfinished. Political institutions, security apparatuses, markets, cultural movements, and ideological projects sustain themselves by managing problems they cannot conclusively solve: inequality, threat, disorder, legitimacy, desire, dissent. Total control would terminate their function. […]

Categories
cybernetics

The Edge of Chaos in Conflict and Communication

Language and (other) communications technologies are built around and positively amplify the signals of difference by and through which human beings define, understand and share or record their experience of the world. The abbreviated macrostates of variously competitive self-definitions emerge and converge in ways that recursively drive the adaptive self-propagation of the communication systems and technologies that embody their primary transmission […]