The world is changing, and institutions are working frantically to ensure that nothing fundamental changes. The result is a self-reinforcing cycle in which the machinery of (i.e. self-)preservation becomes an engine of destruction.
War, wealth and political insecurity reproduce the problems they ostensibly intend to resolve, sustaining destructive relationships whose continuity subsequently appears necessary.
Over coffee, Captain Fractal considers a civilisation whose communication systems increasingly reward the behaviours that undermine its survival. The machinery isn’t broken. That’s the problem.
From social media and human psychology to Gaia and cosmic self-regulation, an exploration of identity, feedback, emergence and the illusion of control.
The paradox is how to preserve a planetary civilisation’s capacity for emergent self-regulation without irreversibly surrendering it to the political, economic and technological artefacts, entities and systems established to manage and control it.
Climate change is not occurring inside a stable planetary system. It is altering the persistent structure of relations among climatic states, variables and phases, changing the conditions under which subsequent states become possible and probable.
Communication systems can make an interpretation familiar before it has been examined, significant before it has been understood, and consequential before anyone establishes whether it is true.
A civilisation builds systems to solve its problems, then discovers that the systems have become the problems, while its dependence upon them has made their continuity deeply problematic.
The machinery does not need to fail. It only needs to keep working in ways that make more of itself necessary.
Technocratic complexity and populist caricature are parts of the same feedback loop. Each produces the conditions that sustain the other.
Institutions rarely fail because they cannot recognise problems. They fail because recognising problems is not the same as escaping the conditions that reproduce them.
Capitalism does not distribute abundance. It sustains value by distributing differential (as inequitable) access.
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