Categories
cybernetics

Institutional Decay

I spent decades preparing for real inquiry — thinking that universities existed to confront the unknown. Instead, I walked into a machine that protects itself before it protects knowledge. It acts like a guardian of truth while defending hierarchy. It talks about discovery while policing deviation. The gap between its claims and its actions doesn’t […]

Categories
cybernetics

Mind the Gap: Hidden Disability

Invisible disability exposes a structural mismatch between experience and assessment. Institutions rely on narrow snapshots — fixed criteria, discrete checkboxes, procedural thresholds — to determine what counts as relevant evidence. These frames compress complexity into a form legible to an administrative workflow, but the compression also screens out the fluctuating cognitive load, episodic variation, and […]

Categories
cybernetics

Institutional Epistemology

The canonical irony of institutional epistemology is that once an organisation derives its coherence from misunderstanding, that misunderstanding becomes its stabilising feedback loop. In cybernetic terms, the error signal ceases to correct deviation and instead sustains it—control reorganises itself around dysfunction. The system maintains identity not through adaptation, but through the ritual preservation of its […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Orbits of Denial

What we call government, institutions, or corporate leadership has collapsed into a single field of self-preservation, each part feeding and depending on the other until the distinctions blur. The machinery runs, not because it is working, but because nobody within it can stop. Failure is obvious, yet denial is structural—built into the protocols, the language, […]

Categories
culture

Institutional Bullshit

Institutions are adept at naming their own failures but structurally incapable of addressing them. The bureaucratic cycle rewards discussion, reports, committees, and procedures that extend problems rather than resolve them. What gets called “management” is often the art of sustaining a tolerable stalemate, a perpetual negotiation that keeps the machinery alive without meaningfully engaging the […]

Categories
Philosophy

Got Citations?

Academic publishing has become (but perhaps always was) a hall of self-congratulatory mirrors and narcissistic pomp. What passes for validation is too often citation upon citation, a chain of references with no ground beneath it. The rhetoric of fact-checking and peer review masks a system that rewards repetition (and compliance), not discovery, and hierarchy, not […]

Categories
Philosophy

Uncool, Cybernetics School…

What begins as an act of response—a mutation, a thought, a tool—is not designed to last. It emerges, briefly optimal in a changing landscape, then fades or fragments. But sometimes, the solution doesn’t end when the problem is gone. Sometimes the solution learns to survive. It begins to reinforce itself, not because it’s still needed, […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

It’s All a Bit Shit, Isn’t It?

On Suffering, Communication, and the Institutionalisation of Despair Suffering isn’t anomalous; it’s transmissible. And crucially, it’s more transmissible than almost anything else. In the logic of communication systems, negativity spreads not because of some metaphysical malevolence but because of the dynamics of signal transmission itself. Fear, outrage, grief—they’re high-frequency, low-bandwidth. They slot neatly into channels […]

Categories
cybernetics Philosophy

Bureaucracy

The operational (as regulatory) constraints required to self-propagate a money machine and business or community and ecology of institutional organisation are also the primary braking mechanisms of an inertia that is so profound and so deeply infused within the symbolic, socioaffective and cultural systems we inhabit, that we are as commonly unable to perceive this […]

Categories
technology

LLMs and Institutional Change

Current institutional angst (as sociocultural microcosm) and advice regarding the provenance of machine generated words, sentences and documents feels a little misdirective. That is, it still takes considerable intelligence and patience to extract and usefully curate prose or otherwise insightful text from these new tools. If an LLM has been used is itself neither good […]

Categories
Philosophy

Enigma: Cartography of Self

The more that our inner worlds become outer artefacts, the more that our personal lives (now – thoughts) becomes commercial or surveillance data points, the more that the porous boundaries of psychological and material subjectivity disassemble and dissolve. A history, a culture, a civilisation predicated upon the ascendance of individuality (and it’s logical complement of […]

Categories
AI

Inhibiting Intelligence

Conventional platitudes and “safe” research agendas actively inhibit the free flow of ideas that discovery and authentic intellectual creativity or intelligence require.