Life is not astonishing simply because it exists. It is astonishing because, against every available opportunity to fall apart, it keeps holding together and this resilience is the kernel core of its persistence.
Many of the largest problems now confronting technologically advanced societies are not failures of engineering, they are consequences of its success.
Disinformation is not the opposite of information, but one of the ways communication organises uncertainty into meaning. Its deeper structure belongs less to politics than to the philosophical problem of how truth, coherence, and identity emerge at all.
Technology at scale preferentially industrialises the parts of human nature that are easiest to measure, repeat, monetise, automate, and weaponise. Those parts are rarely our best ones.
When organisations confuse confidence with competence, wealth with wisdom, and power with understanding, incompetence is no longer simply a failure of leadership but becomes one of its preferred production methods.
Technology cannot solve itself, because the introspective incompleteness that limits it is a function of the same combinatorial unboundedness that makes it at all possible; spoiler: we humans are similarly and simultaneously bound by identical logic.
Meaning is not stored in words, but sustained in the relations that survive their transformation.
Technology promised to save us effort, then quietly reorganised civilisation around the effort required to sustain technology.
You cannot make the world better by changing who occupies positions of power while leaving the structure of power itself, and the machinery rewarding its behaviour, intact.
Malakacene: the long historical moment in which technologically mediated societies stopped selecting primarily for competence, wisdom, restraint, and institutional responsibility, and instead became increasingly vulnerable to the rapid propagation of spectacle, grievance, aggression, narcissism, and performative certainty masquerading as leadership.
Technologically mediated democracies are invoking remedial, simplified political coherence faster than they are generating the intelligence and/or aptitude required to govern the accelerating complexity of contemporary socioeconomic experience.
A strong current in modern thought still treats things as if they exist first, complete in themselves, and only later enter into relation with other things. The individual. The institution. The nation-state. The market. The technological platform. These are often imagined as discrete objects possessing internal coherence, as though persistence were generated primarily from within […]
Daedelus Kite 