The purpose of a system is what it does. Stafford Beer’s principle strips away the comfortable illusions of intent and moral posturing to reveal a bleak symmetry between cause and consequence. If a society continually produces homelessness, addiction, disaffection, and loneliness, then these outcomes are not malfunctions—they are the operational outputs of the system. The […]
The inversion of belonging is precisely what populism seizes upon. Those excluded or half-excluded find themselves drawn to rituals of collective affirmation, not because they generate agency but because they soothe the wound of distance. The gatherings, the chants, the slogans—all of these are not engines of causation but expressions of consequence, reverberations of deeper […]
Dating platforms and social technologies are built around the chase rather than the consummation of intimacy, emotional resonance, or the recognition of social worth. Research on dating app use has shown that the systems rarely deliver enduring outcomes, but rather incentivise continual pursuit, endless swiping, and repetition of cycles of hope and disappointment (Bonilla-Zorita, Griffiths […]
Loneliness begins in language. Not just in what cannot be said, but in what is said and does not arrive. A sentence needs uptake to become real. When no one receives it, the words complete their neat arc and fall back like rain on sealed glass. The echo confirms existence yet withholds communion. The world […]
Dating apps don’t sell love. They sell the chase. Their business model only works if most people fail to find lasting relationships. A happy couple deletes the app and disappears from the revenue stream. That means personal, social, even biological success—stable intimacy, family, belonging—represents commercial failure. So the platforms are designed to keep you searching. […]
An interesting hypothesis is that all social processes are expressions of frequency. While not strictly equivalent, frequencies can be understood as empirical expressions of probability—patterns of recurrence that approximate likelihood over time. In doing so, they engage with dynamical attractors, stabilising tendencies within complex systems that draw trajectories into patterned coherence. The very process of […]
To live a life is to move through time as a bounded organism, continually drawn forward by needs, constraints, and the unchosen momentum of events. It is to be carried in the current of continuity, while making sense of that current by binding fragments into something resembling a narrative. The “good life,” if it can […]
Friendship is slipping further into mediation, filtered through technologies and codified social structures. The weight of loneliness grows as connections are rerouted into circuits and systems that promise togetherness but deliver distance. In the unfolding horizon, the future looks stripped of unmediated presence, leaving companionship as an echo carried by machinery. Systems themselves betray the […]
Spirituality more broadly seems to have been seduced by a personality cult that opportunistically misrepresents and all too easily misunderstands messenger and signal as isomorphic with message, quite agnostic of the significance of any particular narrative. This is an elementary projective narcissism, identifying individual with an essentially inarticulable metaphysics of Other and world that is […]
The definitions of words. The definition (or description) of a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a document, a corpus. At the “atomic” level of words, each definition and interpreted meaning is inflated and rendered intelligibly sensible as a function of dependency. All words being defined in terms of other words, and as Bertrand Russell reflects […]
Technologically-mediated communication is creating the global epidemic of loneliness. Alienation and emptiness is a signal amplified by our ubiquitous and omnipresent sense and experience of contemporary connectivity, an inward-turning inflection of systemic extensibility for which we are quite poorly prepared by the majority of our evolutionary history. Kindness fades in these moments as everyone struggles […]
Ever noticed that the more connected we all are, the more isolated we become? The more we are compelled to anchor our identities, experience and memory upon an external world, the lonelier and less certain this inner self becomes? Having once passed over the event horizon of self-accelerating sociotechnical metamorphosis we are each and all […]
Daedelus Kite 