Culture, Communication, Complexity.

Tag: epistemic closure

Institutional Event Horizon

Post author By G
Post date Jan 30, 2026
No Comments on Institutional Event Horizon

By the time you understand how academia actually works, you are already trapped inside it. That is the trick. Entry is sold as freedom of thought, critique, and discovery. What you encounter instead is a dense lattice of reputation management, contractual silence, risk avoidance, and procedural obedience. Say the wrong thing, name the wrong problem, […]

Philosophy

Corruptible Scholasticism

Post author By G
Post date Jan 26, 2026
No Comments on Corruptible Scholasticism

Institutional scholasticism does not primarily exist to discover truth. It exists to reproduce itself. It operates through status hierarchies, reputational gating, and compliance rituals that slowly but efficiently select against intellectual risk. Advancement depends less on clarity, insight, or courage than on strategic alignment, calibrated language, and ritual citation. Academic publishing, the circulatory system of […]

Tags academic capitalism, academic gatekeeping, academic power structures, academic publishing crisis, algorithmic governance, bureaucratic hierarchy, censorship by incentive, citation politics, communication systems, corporate academia, credentialism, critical theory, cultural power, cultural reproduction, cybernetic critique, education systems critique, elite reproduction, epistemic closure, institutional corruption, institutional decay, institutional failure, intellectual conformity, intellectual freedom, knowledge monopolies, knowledge production, political economy of knowledge, power and knowledge, prestige economy, reputational control, scholarly independence, scholastic hierarchy, status systems, systemic capture, systemic corruption, systems analysis, thought suppression

Philosophy

Diminishing Returns

I am withdrawing from almost all U.S.-based digital subscriptions; soon, all. This is not a symbolic gesture or an act of ideological theatre. It is a practical decision grounded in observation. Platform governance is converging with corporate and political power into a single operational field, where economic alignment determines visibility, legitimacy, and survival. The architecture […]

Tags 2026, algorithmic censorship, algorithmic moderation, attention economy, civil liberties, cognitive freedom, communication systems, content suppression, corporate influence, corporate power, cultural hegemony, cultural power, cybernetic governance, data colonialism, decentralised media, democratic erosion, digital ethics, digital resistance, digital sovereignty, epistemic closure, free expression, independent publishing, information control, information ecosystems, informational autonomy, media consolidation, media critique, narrative control, network effects, platform capitalism, platform governance, platform monopolies, political economy, power concentration, speech regulation, surveillance capitalism, system collapse, techno politics, technology and society

cybernetics

Productive Misanthropy

Service delivery systems must model the environments they act within. This is unavoidable. Eligibility rules, risk categories, performance metrics, and compliance frameworks are all abstractions that allow action under constraint. The model is not the world. It is an interface that reduces complexity to something administrable. Over time, however, the interface acquires weight. The abstraction […]

Tags accountability regimes, activation policy, ADM oversight, administrative burden, administrative error, administrative exhaustion, administrative violence, adverse outcomes reproduction, algorithmic governance, appeals system, APS governance, ashby law, audit and assurance, audit culture, audit logs, australian public administration, automated decision making, backlog dynamics, benefits navigation, bureaucratic drift, campbell law, carceral throughput, care coordination failure, case load pressure, case processing, centrelink processes, churn management, commonwealth integrity, comparative public policy, complex adaptive systems, complexity informed governance, compliance complexity, compliance theatre, consultancy dependence, control systems, cost shifting, cybernetics in policy, debt recovery algorithms, digital by default services, digital identity, dignity in service delivery, disability services, documentation requirements, downstream harm, eligibility criteria, entropy displacement, epistemic closure, explainability, feedback loops, frontline discretion, general systems theory, goodhart law, governance-failure, government accountability australia, health system navigation, high dimensional systems, human centred design, identity verification burden, incentive design, income averaging, inequality reproduction, information asymmetry, institutional complexity, institutional self maintenance, integrated services, jobseeker compliance, justice system churn, knowledge hierarchies, KPI gaming, legibility politics, marginalisation dynamics, metric fixation, model provisionality, model reality mismatch, mutual obligation, mygov access, NDIS administration, non take up, operational efficiency traps, organisational learning, organisational legitimacy, payment suspension, performance reporting, performance targets, policy compliance burden, policy framework inertia, policy humility, policy implementation gap, policy modelling, poverty administration, procedural churn, procedural denial, procedural friction, procedural justice, procedural opacity, procurement incentives, productive misanthropy, provisional metrics, public accountability, public sector ethics, public sector reform, public value, queue management, rationing by process, recidivism cycle, recipient experience, regulation lived experience, regulatory systems, representational assumptions, requisite variety, review tribunals, risk management culture, risk scoring, ritualised validation, robodebt, robodebt royal commission, sanctions regime, sensemaking organisations, service delivery systems, service design, service recipient entropy, services australia, services australia call centre, social determinants of health, social protection systems, social welfare policy, state simplification, statistical governance, street level bureaucracy, system stability versus success, systems dynamics, systems thinking, target culture, transparency, trauma informed services, triage systems, trust in institutions, unemployment services, welfare administration, welfare conditionality, workforce australia

Psychology

Intelligence, Lost

There is a specific psychological trap that closes once people believe intelligence has been defined. Not improved, not approximated, not extended—but captured. Once intelligence is perceived as a solved object, externalised and perfected elsewhere (in systems, institutions, or machines), the individual cognitive posture changes in a very particular way: curiosity collapses into compliance. This is […]

Tags AGI hype, AI hype, answer culture, anti-curiosity dynamics, attention economy, authority transfer, automation bias, belief hardening, certainty addiction, civilisational cognition, cognitive atrophy, cognitive offloading, cognitive surrender, collective intelligence decline, communication systems, complex systems, compliance over cognition, curiosity collapse, definition trap, entropy and cognition, epistemic authority, epistemic closure, epistemic complacency, epistemic passivity, epistemic risk, field intelligence, finality trap, hype and cognition, illusion of completion, intellectual dependency, intelligence as solved problem, knowledge fetishism, language and cognition, learned helplessness, loss of epistemic tension, metacognition failure, normalisation of stupidity, outsourced thinking, post-critical cognition, psychology of belief, psychology of intelligence, superintelligence myth, synthetic consensus, systems psychology, technocratic authority, thinking as retrieval