Categories
cybernetics Philosophy

Civilisation: Diary of a Madman

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.

Categories
cybernetics

Populism: All the World’s a Feedback Loop

Technocratic complexity and populist caricature are parts of the same feedback loop. Each produces the conditions that sustain the other.

Categories
Philosophy

[01] Disinformation Dynamics: A Relational Framework for Persistent Communicative Organisation

01-DD

Categories
Philosophy

[02] Recursive Harmonics: The Mathematical Structure of Communicative Organisation

02-DD

Categories
Philosophy

[03] Measurement and Diagnostics: Observing Persistent Communicative Organisation

03-DD

Categories
cybernetics

how complex institutions preserve failure

Institutions rarely fail because they cannot recognise problems. They fail because recognising problems is not the same as escaping the conditions that reproduce them.

Categories
Philosophy

institutional conservatism and the failure of inquiry

The result is a civilisation increasingly confronted by novel problems, yet repeatedly encouraged to admire the elegance with which it preserves the assumptions that produced them.

Categories
cybernetics

system dynamics: non-linearity

Non-linearity is rarely an explanation in itself. More often, it is a sign that causal structure is richer than our current description captures.

Categories
cybernetics

cmd & ctrl, we have a problem

The drone is only the visible object. The real event is the combinatorial explosion of sensors, signals, decisions, delays, targets, countermeasures, and feedback loops.

Categories
cybernetics

phase control: communication, power, and the politics of timing

Change the timing and you change the structure. Communication is not merely the transfer of information through a network but the propagation of signals through media of different densities, delays, and constraints. Small temporal modulations accumulate. Phase shifts become interference patterns. Interference becomes organisation.

Categories
cybernetics

strait of hormuz

The more instability surrounds the Strait of Hormuz, the more valuable it becomes. The paradox is that a prolonged conflict may be increasing the strategic importance of one of Iran’s most powerful sources of leverage.

Categories
cybernetics

technique, technology, tesseract

Many of the largest problems now confronting technologically advanced societies are not failures of engineering, they are consequences of its success.