Categories
communication

After Bondi: Communication System Dynamics

After the Bondi shooting, what unfolds across news coverage, social media, and everyday conversation is not just reaction. It is a shared system under stress adjusting itself in real time. People feel fear, grief, anger, and vigilance because something genuinely terrible has happened. Those feelings are not secondary effects. They are the human reality of […]

Categories
politics

Bad News Bears: Populism in Australia

Tyrranical ignorance resurfaces not as a national quirk but as a communicative phenomenon: as complexity scales, systems collapse toward simpler signals — not because simplicity is true, but because it is what travels fastest and replicates most easily. Influence accrues to those who reduce the world to the fewest moving parts. What we’re living through […]

Categories
cybernetics

The Hand of Law

Law presents itself as a guardian of rights and social peace, but its core function is to preserve the legal order and the interests that dominate it. Rights are recognised only when they stabilise that order; when they challenge the hierarchy that sustains it, they are restricted or quietly ignored. Property is the central unit […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Productive Uncertainty of Power

Large power systems — empires, blocs, security states, even global institutions — have never truly stabilised themselves by removing uncertainty. They stabilise by circulating it. Their administrative, legal, economic, and military structures function less as closures than as distribution networks for tension. Centre and periphery. Insider and outsider. Stability and threat. These are not failures […]

Categories
cybernetics

Limited Language Models

In recent years, large language models have moved along a gradient from research artefacts into everyday infrastructure—search, email, design tools, call centres, legal drafting, medical triage. They operate by predicting the next token in a sequence, trained on vast corpora of text and code. Their fluency comes from compression, not comprehension. They do not possess […]

Categories
language

Semantic Pantomime

They are running a government as if language were a spellbook. Say the thing, and reality must comply; deny the thing, and it must vanish. It is a kindergarten pantomime of semantics—an infantile cosmology where words are treated as prior to the world rather than produced by (as emergent from) it. The corruption and the […]

Categories
communication

Writing Without AI

It is a dying practise. Even as automation bludgeons narrative salience and nuance into the cognitively and culturally low-functioning relational slurry that it has now become, our thought patterns and socioeconomic reflexes adapt and align along with it. Try writing without AI. Feel the difference. That is natural intelligence. That is life.

Categories
cybernetics

Disinformation:  Instrumentalising Communicative Ambiguity

Ambiguity is not the failure of truth; it is the field through which truth sustains itself. What we name “disinformation” is simply the deliberate modulation of this ambiguity—the thickening of uncertainty at the edges so that order can stabilise at the centre. Systems depend on that tension. Clarity cannot exist without contrast, nor coherence without […]

Categories
communication

More Words

Language is both the tool and the trap. We imagine ourselves steering it toward justice, order, or truth, yet language is steering us toward whatever best ensures its own survival. Our systems—legal, political, bureaucratic, technological—do not simply operate in language; they operate for it. Every new term, policy, and narrative strengthens the structures of description […]

Categories
cybernetics

Coherence through Contradiction: A Game of Words

Civilisation runs on language. Every system we build—laws, markets, machines, minds—depends on describing the world in order to act within it. Yet the world always moves first. The act of catching up is not a flaw but the essence of thought: meaning arises in pursuit, not possession. The delay—between what is and what can be […]

Categories
communication

Influence: Affective Resonance

Affective resonance is the synchrony that precedes understanding—the subtle entrainment of physiological and emotional states that aligns individuals before they think in unison. Like oscillators in the Kuramoto model, human nervous systems phase-lock through tone, cadence, and shared temporal fields. What we call meaning often arises only after this alignment has already occurred, retroactively justified […]

Categories
communication

Before Words Mean: Ideological Self-propagation

Words work before they mean. Long before comprehension, their rhythm, tone, and pattern capture attention. They anchor consciousness. This is semiosis at its rawest: symbols not yet parsed but already guiding perception. A word doesn’t just describe—it arranges how the mind listens, what it expects, and where it looks. Repetition, cadence, and emotional charge cultivate […]