If you think politics is the solution to a world deeply problematised by entropic gradients of political turbulence, you’re either an idiot or you’re evil. Politics doesn’t solve problems, it feeds on them. It sustains itself by displacement — shuffling costs, hiding contradictions, weaponising blame. Nothing fundamental ever changes because the system isn’t built to […]
The uproar around immigration is less about migration itself than about the structural turbulence of complex systems diffusing toward equilibrium. Blaming newcomers is the lowest common denominator because it provides a ready-made, simplified narrative—one that maps frustration onto visible targets rather than onto the more abstract dynamics of monopolistic economics, institutional inertia, or technological disruption. […]
Nationalism and anti-immigration movements recycle the same script: identify an external group, blame them for decline, and convert frustration into political capital. Yet the structural causes—corporate monopolies, rent-seeking industries, regulatory capture—remain largely unexamined. People misattribute the erosion of wages, housing affordability, and job security to migrants because scapegoating offers a simple, visceral answer where systemic […]
History shows that evil is often less a grand design than the byproduct of ordinary negligence. Hannah Arendt called it the “banality of evil” — Eichmann sending millions to death not out of demonic hatred but bureaucratic obedience. Psychologists like Stanley Milgram demonstrated how everyday people, given orders, would administer lethal shocks rather than resist […]
On Suffering, Communication, and the Institutionalisation of Despair Suffering isn’t anomalous; it’s transmissible. And crucially, it’s more transmissible than almost anything else. In the logic of communication systems, negativity spreads not because of some metaphysical malevolence but because of the dynamics of signal transmission itself. Fear, outrage, grief—they’re high-frequency, low-bandwidth. They slot neatly into channels […]
Autocracy, in its formal sense, consolidates power into a singular locus: a ruler, a regime, a party. Legally and politically, it bypasses checks and balances, suppresses dissent, narrows the bandwidth of permissible expression. Sociologically, it restructures public life around vertical loyalty, replacing distributed agency with enforced coherence. Yet beyond the formal mechanisms of control—censorship, surveillance, […]
Language, with unbounded combinatorial multiplicity and potentially endless degrees of conceptual freedom, remains insufficient to provide the closure or certainty we often seek when navigating the complex worlds and systems of belief we have constructed. Yet it is precisely this absence of closure that makes language meaningful. Meaning is grounded in ambiguity, an irreducible tension […]
It’s not always obvious, but it’s grimly consistent: most dictators and autocrats aren’t clever—they’re just willing to be cruel. A few have enough low cunning to seize a moment or twist a system, but intelligence isn’t the driver. It’s laziness, brutality, and the fact that violence is the fastest shortcut to power if you don’t […]
When reduced to its essence, the simplicity of global conflict is as horrifying as it is absurd.
Humanity has, at scale and en masse, a profoundly insecure dependency on aggressive self-determination. This is the great unaddressed issue of our historical moment, perhaps of history more generally, and may indeed be an undecidable problem. We may not be able to unambiguously determine causal factors or clarify many of the things we really could […]
Luddites, yes, and just as blindness might take many forms, there are so many ways to inhibit the progress of civilisation or work against those creatively seeking collaborative solutions to humanity’s shared existential problems. For some, it becomes a professional if not also political vocation of ignorant bluster and destructive blundering. Analysis is interesting but […]
Is America sleepwalking into tyrrany? El sueño de la razón produce monstruos. Context: How far would Trump go? I’m really very grateful that I live in a democracy that is not, currently at least, painfully and publicly disassembling itself.
Daedelus Kite 