The question is whether civilisation can preserve its capacity to continue without making recurrent destruction the principal instrument of its renewal.
Tag: entropy
We built machines to finish our sentences. Now they are helping us finish the world.
Climate change is not a problem inside a stable planetary system. This text indicates how it is reorganising the relations through which planetary stability itself is reproduced.
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The Essence of Language
Language, like all communication systems, holds together not despite displacement, delay and uncertainty, but because of them.
Technology keeps solving the problems technology creates, tightening our dependence on machinery whose cumulative costs keep growing and from which there is no longer any clean exit.
Conflict builds technology, technology reorganises conflict, and somewhere inside the loop every new problem becomes someone’s next investment opportunity.
Categories
WTF
We keep telling the same stories in different ways. The faces, crises and characters change. The same tribal pattern keeps finding new forms.
The machinery does not need to fail. It only needs to keep working in ways that make more of itself necessary.
The present is not where possibility ends. It is where an immeasurably larger field of possible futures acquires one local history.
Technocratic complexity and populist caricature are parts of the same feedback loop. Each produces the conditions that sustain the other.
The probable is a proper subset of the possible. Old habits die hard because viable communication preferentially reproduces patterns that make themselves more likely to recur.
The technological system cannot perceive its full costs because that blindness is one of the conditions of its success.
