Stupidity is not the absence of intelligence. It is what remains when intelligence has no traction. At planetary scale, selection pressure favours whatever travels fastest through the channels of attention, capital, and command. Systems built to maximise replication discover that nuance is drag and understanding is latency. Thought requires time; stupidity is instantaneous. In a […]
Extreme concentrations of wealth are not anomalies sitting awkwardly inside an otherwise functioning system. They are what the system becomes when its capacity to attenuate runaway amplification has been compromised. In any open, adaptive system, stability is not achieved through static balance but through a continuous negotiation between reinforcing and dispersive forces. Positive feedback generates […]
Government services fail not only because of underfunding, incompetence, or political neglect. They fail because of a structural dynamic baked into the way bureaucracies sustain themselves. Take social support systems. The stated function is simple: provide assistance to people who’ve lost their jobs until they can find another. But the actual functioning diverges. The machinery […]
Pyrrhic Victory (n.) Applied sense:To turn one’s own country into a bonfire for profit — extracting wealth by consuming the social, cultural, and material fabric that sustains it — such that the source of value itself is extinguished. The “victory” lies only in the counting of money that can no longer circulate within the ruins […]
Our universities are not producing experts or competency, but inasmuch as they are—and where they are—it exists only as an outlier within the great goo of median self-replication to which hierarchical bureaucracy is naturally attracted. The institutional frame does not optimise for insight but for the recursive preservation of itself, absorbing deviation back into the […]
The more you blame others, the more afraid you become. The more afraid you become, the more you need to blame others. Blame draws breath: inhale the fear of others, exhale the accusation that keeps it alive. The cycle is seductive because it feels like control—naming enemies, drawing lines, standing strong—but what sustains it is […]
Billy Connolly tells the story of ordering Mexican food and realising it’s all the same thing, just folded differently. He asked for something new, but it wasn’t what he expected. The waiter brought the chef, who unfolded the meal, refolded it another way, and handed it back—“There you go.” I was a postgraduate student in […]
Dependency is the real problem. To be relevant in an organisation, or even in an industry, one must be dependent—on structures, on hierarchies, on approval. And to be dependent in this way requires the curtailing of one’s own insight, the conscious trimming of perspective to fit what the system already permits. This is not an […]
Most organizations eventually require radical transformation. They drift into and through forms of neurosis, clinging to outdated responses while the environment around them changes. A gap opens between what was, what is, and what is becoming, and it is within this gap that organizational structures harden into habits that no longer serve their purpose. In […]
Charles Bukowski was born in 1920, in Andernach, Germany, and died in Los Angeles in 1994. Most of his life unspooled across the raw edges of the American city—the factories, the post offices, the rented rooms with peeling walls and no guarantees. He worked jobs that broke bodies and wrote about the things polite society […]
Context: More Dangerous’ Than Nukes—China And Russia Revealed To Be Suddenly Abandoning The U.S. Dollar For A Bitcoin, Ethereum And XRP-Inspired Rival Amid Crypto Price Pump. A cunning plan. I’m going to suggest that self-inflicted existential desperation makes strange bedfellows of technologies and autocrats. The strangest of all being the expected benefits of socioeconomic, cultural […]
It is interesting to observe how all of our problems and transient solutions take the form of word games. Beyond the autocatalytic pathologies of self-regulatory perseveration, I think it is worth noting that the game itself is the sole beneficiary of this psychological and organisational recursion. Language itself is quite poorly suited to the complex […]
Daedelus Kite 