A force built to exploit asymmetry now operates inside legal and informational systems capable of generating asymmetric effects upon it.
Tag: information systems
We have entered an era in which the second-order complexity of ubiquitous information and energy feedback systems has become the new centre of gravity. Not industry alone. Not territory alone. Not even ideology in the older twentieth-century sense. The decisive terrain is now the recursive infrastructure through which signals circulate, stabilise, amplify, and reorganise behaviour […]
Technology is extraordinary. It extends memory, speed, coordination, reach, and control. But it also carries a persistent deception. Not because it is unreal, but because it repeatedly presents open systems as though they could be made to feel closed. Cybersecurity makes this especially clear. There is no final safety, no completed perimeter, no settled technical […]
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Revolutionary Phase
A system optimised for speed and extraction can be disempowered not by rupture, but by altering the timing and pathways through which it expects to operate. In a parallel timeline, change did not arrive as rupture but as reconfiguration within the platforms and infrastructures that organised collective behaviour, where optimisation systems once tuned for engagement, […]
Yesterday, sitting with a coffee, I fell into conversation with a group of photography students. It occurred to me that photography, particularly digital photography, is a curious artefact. It feels modern, yet in an important sense it belongs to a slower world, a medium that still obliges attention to pause between perception and interpretation. Consider […]
Endless conflict persists not because it is healthy, just, or sustainable, but because fear is highly efficient at moving through uncertain human systems. What spreads easily is not always what nourishes. Fear can be structurally effective while being psychologically corrosive and socially disastrous. That distinction matters. Signals that bind attention quickly can still produce damaged […]
Metabolising Turbulence in the Information Age When geopolitical shocks ripple through global communication systems, governments often default to interpreting the turbulence through the language of motive, intention, and blame. Actor-centred explanations are easier to communicate and politically actionable, even when the deeper dynamics arise from the interaction of networks, institutions, and information flows. Responsibility still […]
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Dissent: Another War
Resistance to war is easy to respect and hard to execute, because the same communicative channels that allow objection also convert that objection into a commercially and strategically manageable signal. A manageable signal is one whose form, timing, and intensity are already accounted for by the systems that receive it. It can be measured, narrated, […]
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Entropy is King
Entropy, and only entropy, is king. Highly ordered information systems do not rest on harmony. They are grounded in dissonance, volatility, and conflict, just as is extreme wealth sustained by the presence of its antithesis, the incoherent becoming, and always having been, the transmission medium of its inverse. This is not metaphor. It is structural. […]
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Algorithmic Censorship
Across the major platforms, something subtle but consistent is happening. Posts rise, gather momentum, then stall at almost exactly the same threshold, regardless of topic, audience, or timing. The curve flattens not because interest disappears, but because propagation is capped. This pattern repeats on LinkedIn, WordPress, X, Instagram, and beyond. Visibility has become a controlled […]
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What Is New Year’s Eve?
New Year’s Eve is not a clean break in time. It is a maintenance ritual. It presents itself as a boundary between years, as if time were neatly divided and we simply step from one container into the next. That framing works because cognitive, communicative systems like ours require distinctions to operate. We draw lines […]
Sociality and interdependence is our species’ strength but is simultaneously also our weakness. The complex networks and intangible feedback loops of behaviour, communication, material artefacts and technologies upon which we have built a Global civilisation, such as it is, are autonomously self-propagating information systems. Once such psychological, social and cultural systems have gained energy and […]
