The result is a civilisation increasingly confronted by novel problems, yet repeatedly encouraged to admire the elegance with which it preserves the assumptions that produced them.
Tag: institutional inertia
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all swallowed whole
Technology cannot solve itself, because the introspective incompleteness that limits it is a function of the same combinatorial unboundedness that makes it at all possible; spoiler: we humans are similarly and simultaneously bound by identical logic.
Administrative systems fail when they become better at preserving their own procedures than understanding or remediating the human realities those procedures were intended to address.
It took me a long time and much exasperation to recognise and acknowledge that the first rule of communication systems theory club is: do not tell people about the theory. Not because the theory is secret. Because the theory is ineffective as information. People are not waiting for a better model of the system that […]
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 […]
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Strange Days
What strikes me most about the current president of the United States is a strange inversion that would be almost comic if it were not so consequential. He shows little regard for the role he occupies, scant respect for the law, and no evident commitment to the country beyond what it can deliver to him […]
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Quantum Confusion: Institutional Inertia
We are taught to treat quantum mechanics as intrinsically strange, opaque, almost hostile to intuition. The standard story is that reality itself is bizarre, and that only extreme mathematical sophistication grants partial access to it. Yet this framing quietly ignores another possibility: that many workable intuitions, partial models, and genuinely useful ways of thinking never […]
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Technological Gullibility
We are repeatedly assured—quietly, implicitly—that technology is beneficial, inevitable, and continuous. Accepting this assurance has become a mark of sophistication, a moral alibi that aligns seamlessly—and not accidentally—with reverence for wealth and the wealthy. What enriches those at the top is treated as evidence of correctness. Profit becomes a proxy for proof. Wealth no longer […]
