Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, writing in the 19th century, observed that no plan of operations could be expected to survive first contact with the enemy. His insight was not that planning was useless, but that the continuity of command intent required adaptation under conditions of uncertainty. Strategy, as Moltke framed it, could not be […]
Individuation isn’t the slow refinement of a solid self; it’s the gradual recognition that the self was never there in the first place. What loops back through time is not an enduring “I,” but a process — the interplay of perception, memory, and change, tracing shapes in a field that doesn’t belong to any of […]
Unemployment is never just a matter of individual misfortune; it is the visible seam of a whole system that, by its very structure, requires some to fall outside. Support services exist to catch those who slip, but the system is double-edged: their presence signals both care and the ongoing persistence of the very gaps they […]
In an age defined by information overload and communicative saturation, the very structure of meaning is straining under its own weight. Traditional accounts of meaning—rooted in symbols, representation, and local causality—struggle to explain how coherence persists across fragmented, dynamic, and scale-invariant systems. A growing body of work points toward something more subtle and robust: not […]
At the heart of every persistent system is not a substance, but a difference. Field logic begins not with the assertion of identity, but with the recognition that systems cohere through asymmetry. Where classical logic privileges entities and relations, field logic turns to the geometry of tension: a system exists because its mappings do not […]
Meaning = invariance under transformation. Anti-symmetry: if symmetry preserves identity under transformation, anti-symmetry preserves inversion. In logic and physics, an anti-symmetric relation flips sign under exchange:If f(x, y) = –f(y, x), the structure encodes difference as conserved. Applied to meaning:Meaning isn’t preserved by sameness—it’s preserved by structured difference. The system doesn’t reproduce a thing; it reproduces […]
Jay Forrester (1918–2016) was an American engineer and systems theorist whose work shaped both technology and global modelling. At MIT, he invented magnetic core memory, a breakthrough that powered early computers. Later, he pioneered system dynamics, using computer simulations to understand complex systems like corporations, cities, economies, and ecosystems. His World Dynamics and Limits to […]
We tend to fixate on the rise of misanthropes—as though selfishness were some aberration rather than a predictable by-product of a system driven by commercial imperative. But the deeper concern is structural: the ease with which sprawling, intricate bureaucracies can be repurposed, nudged, or tilted into autocratic shapes. That this is possible suggests not merely […]
There are, in general, two main ways to understand a complex system-of-systems. First, as an adaptive constellation of modularly decomposable artefacts, entities and sub-systems as subject to and expressions of orchestration and directed purpose – that is, in terms of its differentiated parts and their relationships. Later, as a bonded, binding proxy organism in which […]
My experience, beyond an effervescing percolation of the very many sociotechnical instances with which both we and our reflexively teleological heuristics of symbolic communication (in and as language) aspire to epistemological closure, is that there is no simplest state or unified descriptive method available to us. Yes, we can iteratively refine taxonomies and (what become) […]
Daedelus Kite 