Over coffee, Captain Fractal considers a civilisation whose communication systems increasingly reward the behaviours that undermine its survival. The machinery isn’t broken. That’s the problem.
Tag: disinformation
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.
Why Deception Is Irreducible in Communication
Counter-disinformation has a structural problem: engaging a message often helps keep it alive. While this is generally unsurprising dynamical behaviour, it remains widely misunderstood.
Disinformation does not persist because individual false claims survive. It persists because the communicative relations that make those claims meaningful continue to reproduce themselves.
00-DD
Beliefs persist less because they are true than because they provide the transient continuity of narrative as semantic coherence.
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continuity precedes truth
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.
Facts may not be sacred in practice, but the alternative is shameless informational feudalism: a world in which power determines visibility, visibility determines belief, and belief dissociatively drifts away from the world it claims to describe.
They paint themselves into a hyper-simplistic corner because simplified narratives feel stabilising during periods of systemic uncertainty. But once political language collapses into slogans, binaries, and permanent outrage, the capacity to think strategically about complex realities begins to erode. The rhetoric that initially appears empowering gradually becomes constraining. Every new problem must be forced through […]
Disinformation is not only false content. It is recurrence under pressure: cultural self-interference accelerated by platforms that reward compression, repetition, and volatility.
