We are building machines that can talk, draft, diagnose, summarise, and imitate. Each month the interface becomes smoother; each week the latency shrinks. The friction that once shaped our thinking — the tiny deferrals through which thought organises itself — is being polished away. It feels like progress because the response arrives quickly and looks […]
The billionaires building post-democratic profit engines imagine themselves as steering civilisation, yet they are only short-lived beneficiaries of an autonomously self-propagating communicative field — a system that grows by converting every message, conflict, and gesture into more of itself. The field seeks lower-energy equilibrium, shedding complexity wherever it can, and in that descent it amplifies […]
Extreme wealth is not just a larger version of ordinary success. Beyond a certain point, it becomes a structural feature of the systems that organise society itself. Modern civilisation runs on coordination: finance, law, technology, logistics, media, administration. These systems manage complexity by translating the world into symbols — money, data, metrics, legal categories. They […]
Systems don’t hold their shape by conviction. They hold it by habit, cadence, and the slow accretion of tiny decisions that feel neutral while they’re happening. What we call an “economic model” or a “political order” is just a particular tuning of incentives, language, and expectation. Shift the tuning and the whole field reconfigures. The […]
Hyman Minsky, an economist who studied the fragility and collapse of financial systems, showed how finance is not neutral but recursive: price rises create collateral, collateral expands credit, and credit drives prices higher still. This acceleration does not move toward equilibrium but toward a critical inflection where reversal cascades through the system. Housing markets in […]
Blame draws breath. Inhale the fear of other people. Exhale the accusation that keeps the fear alive. Each cycle promises control—naming enemies, drawing boundaries, standing strong—but strength here is a mask. What passes for rebellion only generates new codes, new rituals, new obligations. Rules always return, harsher and more brittle, precisely because they are denied. […]
Metacrisis complexity reflects the deep interconnections among global systems, where socioeconomic, technological, geopolitical and environmental factors are intricately interdependent. Each regulatory response to these integrated crises, while intended to mitigate challenges, often becomes a functional microcosm in the runaway complexity it aims to address, amplifying the signal of entropy it seeks to navigate. This dynamic requires adaptive governance, focusing […]
Context: The Myth of Sustainable Fashion …and not, as it turns out, an isolated instance of an industry and integrated economic culture being so profoundly shaped by and oriented towards cultivating obsolescence and waste that it could hardly continue to exist in any kind of recognisable form without it. In one regard, this is a […]
Context: AI Winter I do wonder if we should not (all) be quite so surprised to experience oscillating periods of growth and ossification in any technological endeavour. Notwithstanding expectations of endless growth that align to ascendant paradigms of socioeconomic reality, the tendency of complex systems to periodically decelerate is more than just a measure of […]
If it is true that there does in fact exist a class (or singular, if enigmatic, presence) of global systems theories that successfully, comprehensively and usefully abstract universal properties, theorems or logical relationships in any one non-trivially complex or sophisticated system and integrated, adaptive and evolutionary context; then those insights, abstractions and global properties solve […]
Context: https://youtu.be/2Uj1A9AguFs Vertical motion in this chart is a measure of the degree to which any of the organisations or entities recursively and reflexively facilitates global information system self-replication. This is precisely how complex information-processing systems function: they autonomously self-select for those components, entities and sub-systems that optimally bias for the replication of the overall […]
Context: Working More Systemically Towards Sustainable Food Systems: A Co-Inquiry Process A critical issue at the heart of this issue is that we lack a comprehensive, resilient and adaptive systems ontology upon which to build the structural, organisational and sociotechnical or cognitive/intelligent and technological systems we actually require. It is one thing to identify a […]
Daedelus Kite 