We have constructed a civilisation in which recognising existential risk has become another reason to continue producing it.
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Technocracy: Addicted to Risk
Tag: dependency
Technology keeps solving the problems technology creates, tightening our dependence on machinery whose cumulative costs keep growing and from which there is no longer any clean exit.
The machinery does not need to fail. It only needs to keep working in ways that make more of itself necessary.
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dire straits: the economics of delay
Mechanisms created to manage a recurring condition may become dynamically coupled to, and dependent upon, the continued existence of that condition.
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second-order phase locking
Second-order phase locking is what happens when systems stop reacting to reality and start synchronising to their expectations of disruption.
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technique, technology, tesseract
Many of the largest problems now confronting technologically advanced societies are not failures of engineering, they are consequences of its success.
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all swallowed whole
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.
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Ethical Selves
What is missing precedes the language with which we attempt to describe its consequences.
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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Technology is the Problem
The refrain once urged us to expand: “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Its inversion is now the survival mechanism: Tune out, turn off, drop in. Digital platforms have mastered the art of capture. They are not designed to serve us but to extract attention, time, and revenue from us. The architecture is parasitic—every click […]
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