Categories
cybernetics

Continuity in a Metastable World

We keep lying to ourselves about stability. The polite story is that systems aim for balance, that institutions exist to keep things steady, that culture and politics and technology are here to make life manageable. But none of that is quite true. Things don’t hold together because they are stable in any simple sense. They […]

Categories
cybernetics

On Meta-Stability: Why Things Have to Break

We keep lying to ourselves about stability. The polite story is that systems aim for balance, that institutions exist to keep things steady, that culture and politics and technology are here to make life manageable. But none of that is quite true. Things don’t hold together because they are stable in any simple sense. They […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Extractive Architectures of Political Economy

Every political economy, no matter its self-image or stated goals, relies on the same underlying mechanics: extraction, distribution, control, legitimation, and feedback. These are not policy preferences or ideological signatures—they are structural invariants. Whether in early imperial systems or today’s data-driven economies, these components reappear in form after form. What differs is how they’re masked, […]

Categories
Philosophy

Warring Trumps Competency?

Would a political figure—such as Donald Trump—intentionally provoke or escalate a conflict to divert attention from legal, moral, or reputational collapse, and what does this reveal about the international system of power, perception, and control in a hyper-mediated world? The international system sustains itself through relatively well-managed dysfunction. What appears as failure—supply chain collapse, diplomatic […]

Categories
communication

AI Ethics, Alignment, Responsibility, Strategy

Responsibility is significant. Aligned factors: the most disruptive feature of new technology is counter-intuitively NOT (or at least not only) the novel artefact, entity or system. It is the literally self-sustaining(!) discontinuity by and through which existing and persisting organisational or communications systems defensively lash themselves to the mast of strategic and communicative anachronisms. They […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

The Current Moment is a Strange Place

“The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.” – L.P. Hartley Indeed, and an accelerating technological – as much as cultural – disassembly of the present moment not only slings us post-haste into an uncertain future, but also (and in equal measure) makes itinerant historical tourists and displaced voyeurs of us all […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Continuity of Civilisation

What we more often fail to observe or acknowledge about the generally messy and entropic state of international relations and an apparent inevitability of internecine conflict is that, as a whole, human civilisation is autonomously calculating and computing the optimal means and methods for self-propagation and systemic continuity.  Homeostasis is not engendered through aspiration towards […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Intuition, Computation and the Plausible Continuity of Human Civilisation

Intuitions are the common solutions or theorems of our everyday life. Going with a “gut feeling” is, however, very likely unrelated to the complex of neurons that actually exist in your gut. It is perhaps more of an insight into the patterns and symmetries of information and energy within (and as) which we exist. An […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

That which we love, kills us.

That which we love, kills us. This thread of life and passing narrative or musical improvisation that we all embody – it is a self-propagating pattern of information and energy. We find ourselves serendipitously located at a point of resonance or systemic sweet spot of scale and complexity at which sentience and intelligence has invoked […]

Categories
Philosophy

Ideology and Belief as Self-Propagating Information Pattern

The entropy of difference provides discrete patterns of information and thought with the energy, complexity and momentum they require to self-propagate.

Categories
culture

Counter-culture as Useful Entropy

The dissonance of difference serves useful purposes for the continuity of cultural sytems.

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Self-Replication

Self-replication. Surely this is what life is all about.