Artificial intelligence is the single greatest facilitator of natural stupidity. It accelerates, amplifies, and at least partially self-validates our worst impulses while reassuring us that we are becoming wiser. Most people seem oblivious to the historical thinness and transient fragility of what they hold dear — emotions, bonds, responsibilities, wealth, loss. All of it rests […]
Attempts to stabilise volatile systems by force tend to amplify and exacerbate the volatility they were intended to contain. Sons of Anarchy staged this in miniature: each shortcut, retaliation, or opportunistic scheme deepened the instability that provoked it. The club kept solving yesterday’s damage with tomorrow’s disaster because the logic driving their decisions never changed. […]
A stroke is the abrupt loss of blood flow to brain tissue, either because a vessel is blocked or because it ruptures. The former is ischaemic, the latter haemorrhagic, and both are catastrophic in different ways. One starves neurons, the other floods the surrounding tissue under pressure. Either path leaves a sudden absence where function […]
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 […]
Language has long been treated as a neutral tool of representation, but theorists have shown that it is nothing of the sort. Saussure revealed that meaning arises only in the difference between signs, not from a fixed relation to reality (Saussure, 1916). Wittgenstein emphasised use over essence: words gain their sense within forms of life, […]
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 […]
Every system—whether it’s a company, a community, or a whole civilisation—depends on relationships. We often imagine these relationships as simple connections, like lines on a chart running from point A to point B. But that’s not how they actually work. The real action is in the patterns that form when many relationships overlap. Like the […]
Dependency is the real problem. To be relevant in an organisation, or even in an industry, one must be dependent—on structures, on hierarchies, on approval. And to be dependent in this way requires the curtailing of one’s own insight, the conscious trimming of perspective to fit what the system already permits. This is not an […]
At some point, Trump will be gone. The man will vanish from the stage, but the field that made him possible will remain. That’s the real danger—confusing the collapse of a figure with the collapse of the system that sustained them. Without structural change, the vacancy will simply pull another body into the same orbit. […]
Language is particularly useful and effective as a system of communication but it tends to generate ambiguity and confusion in equal measures to those of the invocation of clarity and understanding. It is not always or immediately apparent but the integrated systems of communication we inhabit are naturally and adaptively biased towards their own reproduction. […]
Uncertainty is perfection. We have all spent so very long and so much effort and wasted time seeking some Other and distant or somehow different completeness and possession of Self as refined, perfect and infallible that we almost entirely missed the point. That uncertainty and doubt which plagues us is really only and always just […]
The twilight of my own aspirations to a peaceful and purposefully useful life on Earth appears to be the dawn of a new Global stupidity. It would be somewhat less distressing to witness a general dissolution and devolution into the flailing, lumbering madness of political and ideological conflict were it not that the buffoons who […]
Daedelus Kite 