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 […]
Affective resonance is the synchrony that precedes understanding—the subtle entrainment of physiological and emotional states that aligns individuals before they think in unison. Like oscillators in the Kuramoto model, human nervous systems phase-lock through tone, cadence, and shared temporal fields. What we call meaning often arises only after this alignment has already occurred, retroactively justified […]
Look around. Corporate technology thrives most when you, generally, do not. Marketing doesn’t sell a device; it sells your susceptibility. Insecurity is the fuel that keeps the machine running—devouring collective futures for short-term gain. Vulnerability has been rebranded as strength. The global condition, though perhaps not entirely or irreparably inevitable, now profits from your dissatisfaction—refining […]
Meaning can be understood as relational invariance under transformation. In mathematics, invariance is what stays the same when everything else changes. In physics, such stability gives rise to conservation laws — momentum from translational symmetry, energy from temporal symmetry. Language behaves the same way: its meaning persists not through fixed definitions but through relationships that […]
Freedom is a word cheapened by misuse. It is invoked as if it were the license to insult, exclude, dominate, or wall oneself off from others while insisting that such enclosure is liberation. Yet what masquerades as independence becomes dependence on the harm and isolation of others, a brittle shell that requires continual reinforcement. This […]
Sometimes, when people look at me and speak, I don’t hear the words—I see the mouth moving and hear the noise, nothing more. It feels like those moments when a familiar word suddenly turns strange, hollowed of meaning, its surface exposed. I think this happens to all of us: every so often, language reveals itself […]
You are being played. Not in the sense of your particular beliefs, nor in the details of what you hold to be true, but in the very act of belief itself. The machinery at work here operates on the substrate of meaning, on the automatic reflex that orients you towards conviction, significance, and sense-making. What […]
Research shows that people are extraordinarily susceptible to suggestion, conformity, and manipulation. From classic social psychology experiments like Asch’s conformity trials or Milgram’s obedience studies, to contemporary evidence of mass persuasion through social media algorithms, it’s clear that human decision-making is easily steered. This is not an insult so much as an observable fact: cognition […]
The rise of rigid ideology is a reciprocal function of the simplicity of the language with which it embellishes itself. This is not a moral judgement, nor an apologetic for autocracy, but a statistical inevitability: simplicity wins because simplicity persists. Such narratives are not the only dynamics at work, but they gain disproportionate attention. Words […]
Nationalism and anti-immigration movements recycle the same script: identify an external group, blame them for decline, and convert frustration into political capital. Yet the structural causes—corporate monopolies, rent-seeking industries, regulatory capture—remain largely unexamined. People misattribute the erosion of wages, housing affordability, and job security to migrants because scapegoating offers a simple, visceral answer where systemic […]
All media is social media. (It’s long past time to tear that bandaid off.) The degree to which the media consumers can engage with and influence that media has certainly undergone some dramatic revisions in recent years but at heart this all remains a social communications system. It is also worth acknowledging that, while the […]
There is a core property of human experience that aligns with the reflexive self-validation of narrative cognition. Whatever facts might exist in the world, the structure and cadence of the conversation (and, clearly, of interpreted conflict) has a tendency for better and for worse to exploit behavioural and psychological instinct as bias towards pattern recognition. […]
Daedelus Kite 