Counter-disinformation has a structural problem: engaging a message often helps keep it alive. While this is generally unsurprising dynamical behaviour, it remains widely misunderstood.
Tag: influence
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Civilisation: Diary of a Madman
A civilisation builds systems to solve its problems, then discovers that the systems have become the problems, while its dependence upon them has made their continuity deeply problematic.
Influence is the capacity of a communicative form to alter the probability distribution of future communication.
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exasperating alliteration
Information does not travel through the world like a message through a pipe. It survives by finding asymmetry, delay, resistance, and feedback — then turning those differences into the conditions of its own propagation.
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 […]
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Influence: Affective Resonance
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 […]
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Techno-Optimism is Bullshit
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 […]
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Lattice
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 […]
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Freedom
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 […]
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Everybody’s Talking at Me
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 […]
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Belief Bingo: Gullibility Disco
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 […]
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