Once intellect is subordinated to ideology, what passes for intelligence becomes whatever reproduces the conditions that sustain that ideology. The prefabricated templates for thought and action that emerge date quickly; they produce only the kinds of crises they are designed to validate. This recursive self-authorization extends beyond political regimes or malfunctioning democracies—it defines a global […]
Language is a dynamic communicative field of oscillatory coupling, in which coherence, drift, and disinformation emerge as harmonic modes of the same process. Drawing on Kuramoto’s synchronisation model, synergetics, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, and information theory, this essay interprets linguistic activity as rhythmic modulation between repetition and deviation. Meaning arises through metastable oscillation among semantic attractors, maintained […]
Meaning can be understood as relational invariance under transformation. In mathematics, invariance is what stays the same when everything else changes. In physics, such stability gives rise to conservation laws — momentum from translational symmetry, energy from temporal symmetry. Language behaves the same way: its meaning persists not through fixed definitions but through relationships that […]
Democracy is often assumed to be more resilient than it is. What is becoming clear in the United States is that its very openness—the freedoms of speech, assembly, and communication—provide the leverage points through which anti-democratic forces operate. If democratic systems can be bent or flipped using relatively low energy—disinformation campaigns, procedural manipulation, networked mobilization—then […]
Pyrrhic Victory (n.) Applied sense:To turn one’s own country into a bonfire for profit — extracting wealth by consuming the social, cultural, and material fabric that sustains it — such that the source of value itself is extinguished. The “victory” lies only in the counting of money that can no longer circulate within the ruins […]
Our descriptions do not contain the world. The world contains our descriptions. Politics pretends otherwise. A speech, a policy, a slogan—each frames itself as if words could sculpt reality by naming it. But language only chases the turbulence it claims to hold, like shadows trying to outpace the objects that cast them, straining toward a […]
An interesting hypothesis is that all social processes are expressions of frequency. While not strictly equivalent, frequencies can be understood as empirical expressions of probability—patterns of recurrence that approximate likelihood over time. In doing so, they engage with dynamical attractors, stabilising tendencies within complex systems that draw trajectories into patterned coherence. The very process of […]
Billy Connolly tells the story of ordering Mexican food and realising it’s all the same thing, just folded differently. He asked for something new, but it wasn’t what he expected. The waiter brought the chef, who unfolded the meal, refolded it another way, and handed it back—“There you go.” I was a postgraduate student in […]
The institutions that claim to be the guardians of knowledge—universities, governments, large corporations—have all become deeply entangled in their own logic of continuity. Universities in particular once positioned themselves as sanctuaries for critical thought, but the reality today is closer to Stafford Beer’s observation in Platform for Change (1975): organizations tend not to innovate, they […]
Power’s paradox is that it flourishes best where it cannot fully dominate. Like the tensile balance of a body held together by structured tension, it requires counterforces, resistance, and the ever-present possibility of dissolution to sustain itself. Autocracy and capital alike reveal this pattern: their most efficient mode of operation is not in a vacuum […]
A political system doesn’t shed its skin and emerge as something new when it flips from “democracy” to “autocracy,” from “left” to “right,” or from “inside” to “outside.” It shifts phase into another register of the same underlying forces—self-interests, fears, incentives, and ambitions. At the core of this self-interest is an essentially empty and insubstantial, […]
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 […]
Daedelus Kite 