Categories
belief

Friction

Belief systems—political, spiritual, cultural—are not merely catalogues of doctrine or symbolic taxonomies but function as frictional zones where indeterminate claims meet, clash, and persist. The turbulence generated by unprovable assertions—whether about metaphysical truth, national destiny, or social justice—creates a binding tension. This tension provides the continuity through which institutions, rituals, and governance structures stabilize themselves, […]

Categories
cybernetics

Department of War?

In 1947, B.F. Skinner conducted a simple experiment with pigeons. Grain was released into a food tray at timed intervals, independent of the birds’ behavior. Yet the pigeons developed elaborate rituals: some turned three times, others bobbed their heads or flapped their wings. They came to believe that their peculiar movements summoned the reward. The […]

Categories
cybernetics

Linguistic Tensegrity

Inasmuch as we exist in, through, and as language, language itself exists through us. Every action—social, emotional, political—is mediated by language, whether spoken, written, or silently structured in thought. What rises to prominence in our networks, especially in today’s hyper-connected systems, is not necessarily truth or depth, but whatever generates further propagation. Language reproduces itself […]

Categories
cybernetics

Language Binds (and Blinds)

Symbolic representation is always in dynamic balance with the complexity it tries to capture. Narratives, languages, and cultural signs compress overwhelming multiplicity into shareable forms, but compression means loss. What is lost is precisely the irreducible turbulence, entanglement, and simultaneity of cultural and civilizational life. Language provides scaffolding for thought and communication, but its grammar […]

Categories
cybernetics

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistical Inevitability

It is a mistake to imagine that cruelty or deception arise from the rare brilliance of tyrants or the careful engineering of conspirators. The truth is flatter, colder: given time, scale, and opportunity, suffering emerges almost as a default outcome, an entropic drift in human systems. Power does not require genius to become exploitative; it […]

Categories
cybernetics

Objective Function of Machine Learning

Studying machine learning now looks less like a steady ascent and more like an asymptotic orbital reference frame perennially caught in and constrained between attraction and repulsion. The desire is centripetal, a pull towards the imagined centre of mastery and promise, but the structure itself functions centrifugally, casting people back out, denying arrival. The gap […]

Categories
cybernetics

Friendship

Friendship is slipping further into mediation, filtered through technologies and codified social structures. The weight of loneliness grows as connections are rerouted into circuits and systems that promise togetherness but deliver distance. In the unfolding horizon, the future looks stripped of unmediated presence, leaving companionship as an echo carried by machinery. Systems themselves betray the […]

Categories
cybernetics technology

You are the Product

Big technology does not connect you—it consumes you. Its business model is not service but extraction. Every keystroke, every gesture, every delay in loading a page becomes a commodity. You are not the customer; you are the crop. The analogy of farming is no metaphor at all: platforms cultivate dependency as a field is tilled […]

Categories
cybernetics

Recursive Tension: Orbit Frame, Logical Orbit, and the Viability of Communication, Culture, and Ecological Systems

Abstract This paper advances a cybernetic account of complex adaptive systems in which coherence is sustained by unresolved tension rather than equilibrium. The orbit frame is introduced as a relational model that represents systems as networks of elastic constraints across gaps that never fully close. Logical orbit is defined as the recursive dynamical process that […]

Categories
cybernetics

The Desire of the Curve: Beauty, Entropy, and the Infinite Centre

Beauty is a trap you walk into willingly. You know you’re being played—by bone structure, by light, by the chemical theatre of your own brain—but you don’t care. You lean in. We all do. It’s the oldest con in the book and the only one we want to keep running. Cross-cultural psychology has been here […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

It’s All a Bit Shit, Isn’t It?

On Suffering, Communication, and the Institutionalisation of Despair Suffering isn’t anomalous; it’s transmissible. And crucially, it’s more transmissible than almost anything else. In the logic of communication systems, negativity spreads not because of some metaphysical malevolence but because of the dynamics of signal transmission itself. Fear, outrage, grief—they’re high-frequency, low-bandwidth. They slot neatly into channels […]

Categories
poetry

Language Leads

Language leads. That’s the hinge point—what swings open the door to everything else. It’s not merely a mirror of thought, or a tool we use. It thinks us, moves us, builds us. Once language emerged, it didn’t just describe life; it became its own strata of evolution. A self-propagating layer, viral in structure, cognitive in […]