How institutions become vulnerable to exploitation through their own rules, incentives and dependencies, and how political, commercial and technological competition can accelerate systemic decline.
Tag: democracy
Democratic vulnerability emerges when the pace of change exceeds the capacity of institutions to recognise, adapt and respond.
A country unable to defend itself risks losing its independence. A country unable to question itself risks losing the capacity to recognise when that independence has already been compromised.
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.
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Populism Without a Populist
Populism may not need to be manufactured. An overwhelmed communication system already rewards simplification, antagonism and recurrence, while those best placed to change it profit from the resulting volatility.
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.
Communication systems can make an interpretation familiar before it has been examined, significant before it has been understood, and consequential before anyone establishes whether it is true.
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Students Walk Out Against One Nation
The student walkout against One Nation points to a larger problem: the affective politics of cultivated antagonism that has become disconcertingly effective as a technologically-mediated, commercially-leveraged narrative system.
A nation cannot be unified by dividing a people against themselves. The danger begins when that contradiction becomes a political method.
Technocratic complexity and populist caricature are parts of the same feedback loop. Each produces the conditions that sustain the other.
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cockroach party
Social media did not create the grievance. It synchronised millions of separate frustrations into a single political force.
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the strange ontology of power
Extreme wealth is not independence. It is an unusually successful dependence upon everyone else.
