Categories
Philosophy

The Cost of Squandering a Superpower

America’s greatest strength was never simply its wealth or military power, but the international relationships that sustained them. As Washington undermines those relationships, the world is learning to become less dependent upon America, with consequences that could be difficult to reverse.

Categories
cybernetics

Stop Worshipping Wankers: Wealth, Power and the Myth of Genius

We mistake extreme wealth for extraordinary human worth, celebrating billionaires as visionaries while overlooking the collective labour, public investment and institutional power behind their fortunes. It’s time to stop confusing wealth with wisdom.

Categories
cybernetics

redesigning the global economy

The greatest trick concentrated capitalism ever pulled was convincing the world that its own most destructive tendencies belonged exclusively to communism.

Categories
cybernetics

the profitable persistence of a broken world

The world is not merely broken. Too many people are paid to keep it that way.

Categories
Philosophy

how wealthy sponsors reshape populist politics

A movement founded on representing those with the least power increasingly depends upon support from those with the most.

Categories
music

Hendrix: House Burning Down

When Jimi Hendrix released House Burning Down on Electric Ladyland, American cities were already unstable. The assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy ignited unrest across neighbourhoods shaped by segregation, economic decline, and deteriorating apartment blocks. Buildings burned in riots, but also through opportunism. Some landlords torched failing properties for insurance. Some […]

Categories
politics

Australian Democracy: One Country, Many Ways

Australia works because it stays balanced. Its democracy is not built on simple agreement, but on the disciplined interaction between different ways of seeing the world. Labor and Liberal are not just rival teams. Together, they form the smallest political structure capable of holding a complex society together. Two sides generate debate, correction, and restraint. […]