Our extraordinary technological and expressive abundance conceals a narrowing of possibility, as the systems rewarding innovation and success make civilisation increasingly fragile.
Tag: cybernetics
The story of Ignaz Semmelweis, whose life-saving discovery reveals how established practices can obstruct new knowledge, with profound human consequences.
A humanistic philosophy informed by system dynamics: why simple solutions often displace problems across time and systems rather than resolving them.
Nobody needs to control the machinery. Repeated communication changes what people notice, expect and respond to, gradually reshaping the culture and politics that emerge from those interactions.
The question is whether civilisation can preserve its capacity to continue without making recurrent destruction the principal instrument of its renewal.
Tech CEOs mistake being rewarded by the machinery for understanding it. The resulting confusion is being offered as humanity’s only available future.
Categories
Holism and Climate Change
Climate change is not occurring inside a stable planetary system. It is altering the persistent structure of relations among climatic states, variables and phases, changing the conditions under which subsequent states become possible and probable.
Climate change is not a problem inside a stable planetary system. This text indicates how it is reorganising the relations through which planetary stability itself is reproduced.
Desire and fear appear to pull us in opposite directions, but both persist through the distance they seek to overcome.
Trump depends upon the opposing media he seeks to exclude. Its opposition generates the conflict through which his political identity acquires force. The wizard needs the curtain, but he also needs someone on the other side insisting that we look behind it.
We are not outside the world we are trying to understand. We are (all) implicated in its disorders, participants in its reproduction, and responsible for what happens next.
An institution’s measure is not how successfully it preserves itself or claims success, but whether it continues to serve its human purpose.
