I went to a School of Cybernetics hoping to develop ideas about how systems organise and reproduce themselves. My experience instead prompted an unexpected examination of institutional authority, intellectual exclusion and the patterns through which institutions reproduce themselves.
We mistake extreme wealth for extraordinary human worth, celebrating billionaires as visionaries while overlooking the collective labour, public investment and institutional power behind their fortunes. It’s time to stop confusing wealth with wisdom.
We are building a world that needs to know more and more about us, just as being unknown becomes increasingly valuable.
A force built to exploit asymmetry now operates inside legal and informational systems capable of generating asymmetric effects upon it.
We are passing a turning point at which the value of human cleverness becomes actively obscured and wilfully excluded by technocratic over-reach.
This is how a system built to produce knowledge becomes a system for reproducing the conditions under which its existing knowledge remains authoritative.
Power does not erase wisdom’s serial warnings about the corruption and cruelty that often accompanies extreme wealth; it orchestrates and sustains an institutional matrix to demonstrate why the warning applies to someone else.
Wealth is not virtue; it is often merely the moment at which exploitation, inheritance, appetite, spectacle, and institutional obedience acquire sufficient polish that the public begins misunderstanding aggregate power as sufficient proxy for strategic wisdom and true moral virtue.
Transnational corporate power does not merely strip-mine the material world. That would be amateur hour. It also strip-mines the symbolic order: trust, language, law, legitimacy, attention, aspiration, fear, guilt, hope, all the warm little mammals by which civilisation convinces itself it is not just a spreadsheet wearing perfume. The corporation no longer sells products in […]
