Categories
cybernetics

The Structure of Absence: How What Is Missing Holds Systems Together

When people speak of nothing, they usually mean emptiness: no matter, no signal, no information. Yet absence is never encountered in isolation. Something is absent only in relation to an organisation for which it could have made a difference. Absence is not an object or an empty region waiting to be filled. It is the […]

Categories
culture

Academic Stasis

Those artefacts, entities and systems that percolate to ascendance in any particular organisational context tend to be as persistent, as suffocating and as self-interested as they are brittle and prone to catastrophic disassembly when encountering significant environmental perturbation. The diminishing returns on disruptive science are a function of an academic system that has undergone pathological […]