The air is full of noise, but not much thought. Individually, people can be sharp, clever, kind. Put enough of us together and something else emerges: a soft median that drifts to the top like foam. Those who rise inside it are not the most intelligent, not the most insightful, but the ones who know […]
The machines are getting louder. They don’t think; they clank. People call it “intelligence” because the marketing is good, because the numbers are big, because nobody likes to be left out of the next gold rush. But clankers aren’t wise. They don’t know what they’re doing. They recombine, they predict, they imitate. Useful enough for […]
Big technology does not connect you—it consumes you. Its business model is not service but extraction. Every keystroke, every gesture, every delay in loading a page becomes a commodity. You are not the customer; you are the crop. The analogy of farming is no metaphor at all: platforms cultivate dependency as a field is tilled […]
We keep lying to ourselves about stability. The polite story is that systems aim for balance, that institutions exist to keep things steady, that culture and politics and technology are here to make life manageable. But none of that is quite true. Things don’t hold together because they are stable in any simple sense. They […]
From outside the United States, the Republican Party’s collapse into moral and intellectual bankruptcy is not just a domestic farce—it’s a global hazard. They’ve thrown their weight behind Donald Trump, a conman who turns every institution he touches into a casino of self-interest and spectacle. This isn’t leadership; it’s theatre for idiots, and the actors […]
The world’s on fire and everyone’s selling marshmallows. I’m sitting here, half in disbelief, half in deja vu, watching the carnival of catastrophe roll on like it’s just another Tuesday. People are making obscene amounts of money monetising distraction, denial, and dopamine, while whole populations are quietly erased beneath the algorithmic rug. It’s not just […]
American Presidency bought and sold by an oligarch, for an idiot, to a tyrant, for thirty pieces of silver.
Money is not the solution. It is the source of most of our problems. The worst thing about this strangely powerful abstraction of value and possession is that it seems as though inequitable outcomes are not only probable, they are positively mandatory in this complex system of systems that our world represents. For anything to […]
Context: How a billionaire-backed network of AI advisers took over Washington This suggests that a genuine existential threat here is not the science or the rapidly speciating logical abstractions that so dramatically inflate artificial intelligence with unbounded potential. The real issue boils down to a runaway train of unrestrained greed. The concept of “existential threat” […]
When encountering the serially haunted futility of so much of our species’ belligerently selfish behavioural vocabulary, I often resort to an attempted witty quip to the effect that this is, yet again and quite simply, “human beings being human”. It is not after all as though most who conduct themselves in variously disgraceful ways have […]
Imagine, if you will, a king. A mighty ruler, a keen follower of Machiavelli and thus feared much more than loved and very clever indeed. Of course, being clever is only ever measured by the breadth and depth in which intelligence is defined and this king had come to live in a half-mirrored world of […]
There really is very little doubt that for all the magnificent intellectual achievements of science and culture, it is human stupidity that most forcefully compels history forwards and with which even our greatest accomplishments find themselves inextricably intertwined. From brutally selfish autocratic intransigence to unmanageably complex democratic dissonance, politics is not so much a comedy […]
Daedelus Kite 