We didn’t build technology to serve us; we built it to be served. Every notification, every post, every frictionless interaction is not the system making life easier—it’s the system making you easier to interpret. You aren’t just using the platform; you are formatting yourself into it. Your choices, your moods, your attention spans are being […]
It seems increasingly clear that the American governance system—despite its democratic branding—shares a structural affinity with autocracy. Its mechanisms are optimized for control, continuity, and symbolic legitimacy rather than participatory agency. Alexis de Tocqueville warned of this trajectory, describing a tendency toward soft despotism: not through overt tyranny, but via layers of paternalistic administration and […]
Attention at scale is volumetric—recursive, entropic, structural. You don’t transmit clean signals through this system. You fracture attention, saturate the surface with rhythmic displacement, let the structure self-propagate. The topological field—as exponentiated relation of relations—holds tension, not messages. Meaning flickers, but drift sustains. Influence emerges as deformation, interference, long slow-wave gradients of entropic drift. You […]
Lists seduce us with the illusion of order—each item a shard of clarity arranged just so, hinting at mastery over the infinite. They compress the world into clean lines and neat progressions, comforting in their symmetry, irresistible in their simplicity. In a culture tuned to acceleration, these fragments multiply, not to deepen understanding but to […]
Generative AI systems provide an interface to the near-unbounded representational, referential and/or relationally networked complexity of ourselves, as historical data and informational or logical abstraction. We struggle cognitively and linguistically with a notion that there is no simply deterministic mapping from input to output in these tools. This is not a bug or failure, it […]
Technologically-mediated idioms of symbolic communication reflect, reflexively shape, and functionally reproduce our identities and cultures. It may be less obvious but an orientation towards certainty and regulatory control is grounded in, and validated by, a core dependence upon an effectively impossible and conspicuously absent experience of closure, certainty and control. Consequently, the pursuit of closure […]
Institutional continuity (and all that follows) is reciprocally self-defined through assertions of regulatory control, surveillance, power and – yes – strategy; an interface and communications bridge or feedback loop of some sort forms and self-sustains in this way. This mirrors many a parochial epistemology, but – is the control system and model as adaptive as […]
A totalising political mindset becomes about as self-imprisoned by censorship as it is ever emboldened by it. If it were an unambiguously measurable property, I’d say the damage inflicted upon a nation’s prosperity and sustainable continuity is directly proportional to its self-isolation.
Context: More Dangerous’ Than Nukes—China And Russia Revealed To Be Suddenly Abandoning The U.S. Dollar For A Bitcoin, Ethereum And XRP-Inspired Rival Amid Crypto Price Pump. A cunning plan. I’m going to suggest that self-inflicted existential desperation makes strange bedfellows of technologies and autocrats. The strangest of all being the expected benefits of socioeconomic, cultural […]
There is a paradox of control. The most sophisticated models and methods of shaping regulatory guidance approximate to a complete absence of guidance. Guidance and control is less directed, morec. Taking ecosystems as an example, the distributed self-regulatory function of such a monumentally complex system is an emergent property exhibiting a conspicuous absence of centralised […]
The totalitarian mindset is uniquely fixated and dependent upon an essentially fictional abstraction of closure and control. The sheer impossibility of their aspirations allows them to remain in power because being oriented in this way towards an unattainable goal provides an endlessly self-validating narrative of struggle and purpose.
I was recently asked to write a short reflection on the Cybernetics of Time. It occurs to me that such a narrative must be in no small measure the Cybernetics of Causality. This itself leads to the curious revelation and plausibly cathartic insight that the aspirational control as shaping, influence or purposive feedback that inflates […]
Daedelus Kite 