Categories
environment

After

Heatwaves injure by differential, not by degree, through the lag between what a system is tuned to sustain and what it is suddenly made to carry. After a couple of days over 40 °C the city is quiet this morning, and not only because it is Sunday. Everything is settling back toward itself. Movement slows […]

Categories
communication

Maintenance Mode

Modern systems do not fail for lack of intelligence; they fail because intelligence cannot be sustained inside them. What disrupts institutional self-reproduction is neutralised, not because it is wrong, but because it shortens the cycle. That is the sustainability problem. A civilisation that cannot maintain its own capacity for understanding cannot respond coherently to anything […]

Categories
Philosophy

Stultification Tsunami

The problem is not stupidity. Stupid ideas, taken individually, are manageable. They can be argued with, filtered, contextualised, ignored, or simply outgrown. Human cultures have always contained vast quantities of nonsense and survived quite well. That is not what is new. What is new is scale. A tsunami is not dangerous because each molecule of […]