Categories
cybernetics

The Cold War Never Ended. Capitalism Monetised It.

The Soviet Union collapsed, capitalism declared victory, and everyone went shopping. Now political instability is a profitable industry, foreign adversaries exploit the machinery, and the race to the bottom has become self-financing.

Categories
communication

comment is free, but are facts sacred?

Facts may not be sacred in practice, but the alternative is shameless informational feudalism: a world in which power determines visibility, visibility determines belief, and belief dissociatively drifts away from the world it claims to describe.

Categories
Philosophy

World War

Interstate war continues between Russia and Ukraine, and it does not stand alone. Armed conflict and strategic confrontation persist across multiple regions at once, including parts of the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, and the Western Pacific, where tensions involving China, Taiwan, and surrounding powers remain structurally unresolved. Beyond overt fighting, competition increasingly takes distributed […]

Categories
Philosophy

On Being Smart in Stupid Times

Intelligence is becoming a liability. Not socially ornamental intelligence, not credentialed cleverness, but actual understanding. The kind that sees structure, delay, recursion, consequence. The kind that notices when a system is lying to itself. That form of intelligence generates friction. It interrupts performance. It destabilises belonging. It exposes the hidden costs that simple stories are […]

Categories
cybernetics

Populism

What we are dealing with is not primarily a moral or semantic crisis, even though it is experienced that way. Planetary-scale communication systems behave like physical systems with dense feedback and high throughput: they develop statistical biases toward states that reproduce the conditions of their own continuation. These systems have ontic reality—that is, they are […]

Categories
Philosophy

Dark Logic: The Disinformation Entropy Paradox

A curious, perhaps mischievous, property of complex adaptive systems is that they are autonomously biased towards the means and methods of their own optimal continuity, succinct encoding/self-representation and environmental self-propagation. In this sense, and while acknowledging that diverse actors can and do wilfully generate turbulence and confusion, a listless vessel of policy or doctrine is […]

Categories
culture information technology

Information Age: Influence and Deception, the Omnipresence of Conflict

A game of information, influence and seeded (or targeted) turbulence is unlikely to be winnable (or won) by reproducing and reinforcing the structural, organisational components that merely reproduce and self-validate the axioms, grammars and rules of that game. These games are won by rewriting the rules; by extending an existing grammar and logical framework in […]

Categories
Digital

Unhackable Systems ?

Creating an “unhackable” system is a lofty aspiration; systemic closure is an implicit logical problem.

Categories
culture

Information Conflict may overwhelm us

When information and communications systems become massively autonomous, will we be able to react to the unfolding events in any competitive information and communications space?