At every level of power and influence—government, corporate, institutional, cultural—the refusal to admit problems has become the defining problem. The failures are obvious—collapsing ecosystems, hollowed economies, dysfunctional politics—yet they are wrapped in layers of language and ritual designed to deny them. The performance of belief and positivity masks breakdown until the mask itself becomes indistinguishable […]
Engaging whole and holistic systems is a little like trying to orchestrate and sustain the infinitely complex requisite variety of a universal remote control. 𝘈𝘱𝘱𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘪𝘯/𝘢𝘴 𝘢 𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘪𝘣𝘶𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘧𝘪𝘦𝘭𝘥 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘤𝘦𝘱𝘵 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘴𝘦𝘮𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘶𝘢𝘨𝘦, 𝘯𝘢𝘳𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘤𝘶𝘭𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘢𝘭 𝘢𝘯𝘢𝘭𝘺𝘴𝘪𝘴: 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘰𝘧𝘧𝘴𝘦𝘵 𝘰𝘳 𝘳𝘦𝘭𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘯𝘦𝘵𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘬𝘦𝘥 𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘤𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘮𝘦𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘪𝘴 𝘱𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘪𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘺 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘮𝘦𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨 (𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘵𝘺) 𝘪𝘴 𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘦𝘥 – […]
Context: Oceans are facing a mass extinction event comparable to the ‘Great Dying’ The oceans are dying and yes, friends, this is the kind of vast and unremitting catastrophe that, unlike global wars invoked by the pathological ideological autocratic states that are just not clever enough to understand how stupid and self-persecutory their actions are, […]
Context: Pentagon Wants AI to Predict Events Before They Occur If we abstract the concept of pattern formation from its instances, this becomes plausible. This becomes about not specifically determining what is going to happen but rather and as a function of the resonant (i.e. harmonic) symmetries endemic of and to complex systems, where and […]
The integration of diversity within coherent unity (and as expressed or experienced across multiple technical and functional domains and disciplines) is a core problem of our era. One thing, and context agnostic, that large organisational systems rarely do well is to find effective balance between a need for control (as direction, guidance, intent) and the […]
Context: I am a big fan of Anton Petrov’s space and science YouTube channel. Today I was watching this video which inspired the spontaneous reflection recorded below. Many of the shared, Global and effectively holistic problems that we face as an industrialised technological civilisation are fundamentally and foundationally matters of successfully characterising and negotiating – […]
As a species, we find it difficult to step beyond competitive biases into authentically (and sustainably) collaborative behaviours oriented towards Global development. The rank antitheses of adversarial conflict and shared sense of community (as self-identity) are so deeply entangled in our histories, our cultures, our linguistic assumptions and our psychological experience that effective and enduring […]
The sheer unrepentant complexity and high-dimensionality of the Global problem spaces we face as a technological civilisation imply that to ever or even just survive, the proliferation of shallow and meaningless ideological caricatures may be a necessary component into the far future of humanity. Communication mandates a certain degree of simplicity but reality itself is […]
Global problems require Global solutions but a unified approach to shared problems is nothing if not conspicuous by its absence. Key issues here are that ineffective solutions supporting and cultivating piecemeal or reductive and iterative engagement with such complex, distributed problems are the primary artefacts and policy idioms that tend to percolate to ascendancy through […]
There is quite a lot to be said for the psychological dynamics of a partisan pathology (on all sides of any conflict or adversarial competition) that can only ever define itself reflexively in opposition to and by difference from a fictionalised, idealised and almost entirely abstract fantasy of Other. It is an infantile symmetry that […]
The world must be considered as a single, unified or gestalt and autonomously self-propagating information and energy-processing (i.e. complex, computational) system if it is ever to be successfully negotiated or shaped. Conflict, competition, socioeconomic or geostrategic dissonance and entropy adopt unexpected forms when viewed from Global Systems perspectives. Complex adaptive systems (such as is this […]
Context: Why do we ignore catastrophic risk? It may just be that some entities, artefacts, events or (other) possibilities are so vast and so horrifying that they all but entirely invalidate the limited linguistic or cognitive referential frame(s) of this comforting little semiotic cocoon of complex tautologies and half-mirrored surfaces within which we (all) live. […]
Daedelus Kite 