Categories
politics

political philosophy’s hidden assumption: the person

Political science inherits the person from philosophy without explaining it.

Categories
Philosophy

why identity is not as simple as A = A

A is A. The interesting question is how it keeps getting away with it.

Categories
cybernetics

dire straits: the economics of delay

Mechanisms created to manage a recurring condition may become dynamically coupled to, and dependent upon, the continued existence of that condition.

Categories
Philosophy

before continuity

Nothing (and only nothing!) persists by remaining complete. Continuity emerges because every organised system must keep rebuilding the conditions of its own existence.

Categories
cybernetics

continuity

Continuity is not something to assume, but something to explain. Organised systems persist by continually reproducing the biases that make their own continued organisation more probable.

Categories
life

miracle of persistence

Life is not astonishing simply because it exists. It is astonishing because, against every available opportunity to fall apart, it keeps holding together and this resilience is the kernel core of its persistence.

Categories
cybernetics

continuity precedes truth

Disinformation is not the opposite of information, but one of the ways communication organises uncertainty into meaning. Its deeper structure belongs less to politics than to the philosophical problem of how truth, coherence, and identity emerge at all.

Categories
Philosophy

Order, Disorder, and the Persistence of Socio-Political Form

Socio-political order does not arise because disorder has been removed, nor because conflict has been resolved. Large human systems endure by carrying tension and strain they cannot resolve: unequal interests, delayed consequences, institutional blind spots, competing stories, partial knowledge, uneven power, and the constant need to adapt. What looks like stability is usually a local […]

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 […]