Technology keeps solving the problems technology creates, tightening our dependence on machinery whose cumulative costs keep growing and from which there is no longer any clean exit.
Tag: cybernetics
This is the triumphal stagnancy of technological overreach: extraordinary technical acceleration coupled to an increasingly repetitive behavioural repertoire.
Institutions study the world remarkably well. The harder problem is that the world they are studying is also inside the building, and there is no position outside the system from which that entanglement simply disappears.
The current US President destabilised one of the most tightly coupled junctions on Earth, then seemed surprised when the consequences spread. The deeper problem is that political, ideological and socioeconomic systems often reproduce themselves through the disorder they create.
Categories
Persistence of Reality
Reality persists because nothing (and only nothing!) ever fully coincides with itself.
Categories
WTF
We keep telling the same stories in different ways. The faces, crises and characters change. The same tribal pattern keeps finding new forms.
The manosphere promises strength and control, yet its communities, platforms and markets are structurally and commercially dependent on reproducing the insecurities they claim to resolve.
The machinery does not need to fail. It only needs to keep working in ways that make more of itself necessary.
Technocratic complexity and populist caricature are parts of the same feedback loop. Each produces the conditions that sustain the other.
Meaning repeats because recurrence builds structure, and structure influences what follows. History rhymes for much the same reason.
The probable is a proper subset of the possible. Old habits die hard because viable communication preferentially reproduces patterns that make themselves more likely to recur.
Disinformation does not persist because individual false claims survive. It persists because the communicative relations that make those claims meaningful continue to reproduce themselves.
Daedelus Kite 