Categories
cybernetics

Australia Bets the Future on Big Tech’s “Trust Us” Doctrine

Context: Artificial intelligence to be managed through existing laws as Australia unveils national AI plan Australia has chosen to manage artificial intelligence through “existing laws” and “industry-led standards,” a position repeated across today’s public messaging: flexible oversight, voluntary guardrails, and a promise that the newly announced AI Safety Institute will advise, not constrain. Ministers point […]

Categories
language

Semantic Pantomime

They are running a government as if language were a spellbook. Say the thing, and reality must comply; deny the thing, and it must vanish. It is a kindergarten pantomime of semantics—an infantile cosmology where words are treated as prior to the world rather than produced by (as emergent from) it. The corruption and the […]

Categories
cybernetics

Rhythm: Cybersecurity as System Cycle

Cybersecurity is usually framed as a protective shield—tools, protocols, and practices designed to block attackers and preserve trust in digital systems. Yet this view obscures the deeper reality. Cybersecurity is not simply about erecting barriers, but about managing a continuous cycle of disruption and repair. Breaches and defences do not occur in isolation; they follow […]

Categories
cybernetics

The Dividend of Displacement: How Corporations Profit by Outsourcing Risk

Corporations today amass wealth not by absorbing risk, but by exporting it. Their growth model turns liability into external burden—shifting costs onto users, public systems, or future generations—while repackaging the residue as progress. Externality as Architecture Digital platforms are engineered to reward the sensational, the divisive, and the viral. Outrage propagates faster than nuance, not […]

Categories
cybernetics

The Tyranny of Repetition

To know how systems work—minds, technologies, institutions—is to stand at a vantage where the contours of failure are obvious. You see the repeating loops, the patterned insistence on precedent masquerading as wisdom, the reflexive grasp for what was done before as though it could still suffice. Awareness here does not grant influence; it only exposes […]

Categories
technology

Canberra Just Outsourced Thinking

The Australian government’s move to install its own ChatGPT instances isn’t foresight—it’s capitulation. It’s not a step toward sovereignty in the age of machine intelligence; it’s bureaucratic cosplay. They’re outsourcing cognition under the illusion of control. The irony is brutal: the very act of delegating thought to generative models is being framed as thought leadership. […]

Categories
Philosophy

Fractious Tribes and Ideological Recursions

Successfully negotiating the resonant dissonance of any democracy is indeed deeply problematised by an obligation to successfully define, negotiate and evolve strategies with which to do so. I see the contemporary American problem as being on one hand unique and specific to a particular entanglement of histories, motivations, incentives and value (or belief) systems but […]

Categories
culture

Human Slavery and the Serial Failure of Governments

It is simpler, if often appropriate, to condemn governments for their serial failures to successfully negotiate and interdict slavery and human trafficking. We would all do well to also understand that the reproduction of specific, known and well-defined classes of inequitable outcomes are not merely a consequence of corruption and failures of intelligence where these […]

Categories
politics

Beyond Ideology

Indeed, and similarly – the metric and ticking metronome of those times is so often and deeply inflected by a chronology (as history) measured in, by and as reflexive institutional responses to human being that we have all come to quite normatively expect that all of our catastrophes and our triumphs must necessarily conform to […]

Categories
Philosophy

Stimulus Shenanigans and Structural Inequality

Stress-testing a socioeconomic system: enduring and intractable problems of structural inequality percolate to the surface at moments of extreme duress. The truth is, this system is not foundationally oriented towards supporting anyone other than those who least need it. The people who most need help when the crap hits the fan (as it most certainly […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Hollow Men: Global Institutional Failures

The questions being asked and the problems being solved across government, industry and the community are almost entirely superficial and beyond the general effervescence of hype and rapidly-fading excitement or media and popular interest, the institutional processes and behavioural practices we inhabit have become self-validating rationales. We do not possess any such thing as a […]

Categories
Philosophy

Where have all the Big Ideas gone?

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 […]