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 