Nobody needs to control the machinery. Repeated communication changes what people notice, expect and respond to, gradually reshaping the culture and politics that emerge from those interactions.
Tag: feedback
Climate change is not a problem inside a stable planetary system. This text indicates how it is reorganising the relations through which planetary stability itself is reproduced.
Institutions study the world remarkably well. The harder problem is that the world they are studying is also inside the building, and there is no position outside the system from which that entanglement simply disappears.
The machinery does not need to fail. It only needs to keep working in ways that make more of itself necessary.
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A Theory of Dickheads
Everyone knows a dickhead. The interesting question is why the conditions that generate them do so, enduringly, and with such uncanny frequency.
Meaning repeats because recurrence builds structure, and structure influences what follows. History rhymes for much the same reason.
The probable is a proper subset of the possible. Old habits die hard because viable communication preferentially reproduces patterns that make themselves more likely to recur.
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how capitalism reconstructs scarcity
The institutions assigned to solve our deepest problems are sustained by these, the very relations they are unable and/or unwilling to question.
Capitalism does not distribute abundance. It sustains value by distributing differential (as inequitable) access.
What persists is neither order nor entropy, but the organised difference through which each continually transforms the conditions of the other.
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adaptation: fixing aussie politics
There is no final closure. No permanent certainty. No government that fixes everything forever. There are only systems that adapt well and systems that adapt badly.
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aristotle’s egg
Coherence emerges from the continual negotiation of irreducible difference. Discrete boundaries and differences are contingent.
