Categories
cybernetics

Organisational Inertia

It is an uncomfortable truth that most organisations exist to sustain their own inertia. Systems accumulate procedures, forms, and roles that replicate themselves under the guise of necessity. Meaning, in this context, is not produced by purpose but by repetition—the continual reinforcement of structures that justify their own persistence. The illusion of productivity masks a […]

Categories
cybernetics

Institutional Epistemology

The canonical irony of institutional epistemology is that once an organisation derives its coherence from misunderstanding, that misunderstanding becomes its stabilising feedback loop. In cybernetic terms, the error signal ceases to correct deviation and instead sustains it—control reorganises itself around dysfunction. The system maintains identity not through adaptation, but through the ritual preservation of its […]

Categories
cybernetics

Addicted to Technology?

Technology operates as an engine of sociotechnical addiction not only because of the dopamine loops it inhabits but because of the recursive deficit embedded in every function it provides. Each convenience extracts slightly more than it gives back, yet disguises this loss through displacement: the cost is shifted outward, onto others, into the future, or […]

Categories
cybernetics

Organisational Transformation: It’s Complicated

Most organizations eventually require radical transformation. They drift into and through forms of neurosis, clinging to outdated responses while the environment around them changes. A gap opens between what was, what is, and what is becoming, and it is within this gap that organizational structures harden into habits that no longer serve their purpose. In […]

Categories
cybernetics

Technological Change and Institutional Stasis

The institutions that claim to be the guardians of knowledge—universities, governments, large corporations—have all become deeply entangled in their own logic of continuity. Universities in particular once positioned themselves as sanctuaries for critical thought, but the reality today is closer to Stafford Beer’s observation in Platform for Change (1975): organizations tend not to innovate, they […]

Categories
cybernetics technology

You are the Product

Big technology does not connect you—it consumes you. Its business model is not service but extraction. Every keystroke, every gesture, every delay in loading a page becomes a commodity. You are not the customer; you are the crop. The analogy of farming is no metaphor at all: platforms cultivate dependency as a field is tilled […]

Categories
Philosophy

Confusion and Insecurity

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 […]

Categories
cybernetics

Entropy Locking

Entropy locking describes the scenario where a system and its control mechanism become intricately intertwined with the entropy they produce, relying on an offset diffusion and complexity displacement for adaptive self-sustainment. The environment is simply another system in the most elementary symmetry or definition; a system/environment coupling or communications bridge resembles two systems, entangled with […]

Categories
Philosophy

Emotional Experience

The greatest physical pain a person can ever feel is quite probably bounded by suffering any one of a dozen or so uniquely unpleasant ailments but the greatest emotional pain is almost singularly attributable to the suffering of others. Emotional experience is the essence of compassion and peace of mind but it is a subjective […]

Categories
Philosophy

Autocracy is Addicted to Fear

We all know that the mobster kleptocracy has been catastrophically miscalculating at least in part due to a narrative dependency of getting high on its own supply of disinformation but in the monumental strategic blunder that this invasion represents they display the kernel core of a neurotic psychological pathology. An implicit orientation towards the positive […]

Categories
culture Psychology

Social Media and a Self-Curated Spiral of Depression

Does social media only really exploit us and invoke reflexive psychological and emotional dependency?