The technology sector is learning to metabolise its own disorder: turning instability into dependency, and dependency back into revenue.
The technology sector is learning to metabolise its own disorder: turning instability into dependency, and dependency back into revenue.
Australia is now so thoroughly wired into digital systems that cyber insecurity has become an ordinary cost of institutional existence and everyday subjectivity, not an abnormal failure skulking out beyond the perimeter. The Australian Signals Directorate received more than 84,700 cybercrime reports in 2024–25, roughly one every six minutes; average self-reported losses rose to $33,000 […]
Technology is extraordinary. It extends memory, speed, coordination, reach, and control. But it also carries a persistent deception. Not because it is unreal, but because it repeatedly presents open systems as though they could be made to feel closed. Cybersecurity makes this especially clear. There is no final safety, no completed perimeter, no settled technical […]
Political insecurity mirrors the dynamics of cybersecurity in that the act of securing does not eliminate risk but displaces it into new configurations. In digital systems, firewalls, encryption, and patches reduce certain vulnerabilities but simultaneously generate others, leaving end-users and clients to absorb the cost of residual exposure (Anderson, 2020). Politics demonstrates the same recursive […]
Because mathematics is infinite, the field of cybersecurity can never be truly closed. The space of vulnerabilities is unbounded, each patch or solution only ever an approximation against the open horizon of possible attacks. Risk is permanent, not as a flaw but as a structural consequence: a system that protects itself must also endlessly expose […]
We have been building a global communications network and irreversible technological dependency on foundationally insecure technologies. It’s not wilfully stupid or cynically opportunistic entrepreneurialism, the logic itself is working as much against as for us. A big shout-out to sleep-deprived system support and cybersecurity teams everywhere. Not a good day to be working on an […]
I suspect that human confusion and belligerent insecurity may be irreducible. This is not to say that these things are endemic or necessary properties of either ourselves, or of the world more generally. It is to suggest that our historical development and evolutionary inheritance has so profoundly entangled intelligence with uncertainty that we are not […]
Our experience of information and computational system vulnerability is serially disconcerting yet lies on a logical foundation and abstract continuum of indefinitely-extensible communications network hyper-inflation. There is pretty much always at least one way to recursively assert or map a system back onto itself; such that unexpected or unintended degrees of freedom instance as a […]
Context: Cybercrooks are telling ChatGPT to create malicious code Exponentiation… it’s a language game, all of it. The hyper-inflating state space of all combinatorial possibility has a tendency to drift, through entropy, into precisely those transient structural constellations that maximally reproduce: • not only the elements and instances or references, idioms, sentences, logical fragments and […]
In regards to some study and incidental (as unplanned) research I was engaged in recently, it seems to be most eminently true that the very information and communications technologies upon which we now so critically depend are profoundly, deeply and irredeemably unreliable. This may be no big news to you but I think it justifies […]
Great graphic (from the people at Information is Beautiful) but it immediately raises a question of just how we measure severity, extent and consequence in this context. Is there an offset and identifiable boundary between naive analysis that concentrates on common as relatively unproblematic or pragmatic metrics and more detailed (yet broader spectrum) analysis that […]
Cybernetics tends to be as diverse as the spectrum of artefacts, entities and systems to which it intelligibly or contextually applies. If applied to cybersecurity, must cybernetics necessarily internally model and assume at least the level of variety (as complexity, combinatorial entropy) that its object of study asserts? In this case, does cybernetics then acquire […]