Tag: media ecology

Short-Circuit

Post author By G
Post date Jan 30, 2026
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Meaning arises and endures only because experience and symbolic encoding remain out of phase, and when technology collapses that difference into immediacy and semiotic isomorphism, thought and behaviour collapse into preordained reflex, short-circuiting cognitive voltage into volatility, simplicity, and coercive transmissibility, turning language into a direct instrument of behavioural modulation.

cybernetics

Inside the Cognitive War

A cognitive war is not simply about what you think. It is a war over how you think, because once the structure, code, and cadence of thought, of language, of behaviour are altered, the content becomes easy to steer. Some of these biases are ancient, natural, even necessary: shortcuts of perception, habits of inferential prediction, […]

Tags ai and society, AI ethics, algorithmic control, algorithmic influence, Artificial Intelligence, attention economy, behavioral engineering, cognitive war, collective intelligence, communication systems, complex systems, computational systems, corporate power, critical theory, cultural control, cybernetics, digital-power, disinformation, emergence and complexity, entropy and complexity, Global Systems, human cognition, human condition, identity and power, information age, information warfare, media ecology, misinformation, modern civilization, philosophy of culture, philosophy of mind, philosophy of technology, platform capitalism, political manipulation, political psychology, propaganda, psychological warfare, social media influence, societal change, surveillance capitalism, systemic risk, systems theory, systems thinking, tech power, technological mediation, technology and politics

Philosophy

On Being Smart in Stupid Times

Post author By G
Post date Jan 27, 2026
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Intelligence is becoming a liability. Not socially ornamental intelligence, not credentialed cleverness, but actual understanding. The kind that sees structure, delay, recursion, consequence. The kind that notices when a system is lying to itself. That form of intelligence generates friction. It interrupts performance. It destabilises belonging. It exposes the hidden costs that simple stories are […]

Tags algorithmic amplification, algorithmic governance, attention economy, attention manipulation, behavioral conditioning, cognitive load, cognitive manipulation, collective behavior, collective identity, communication theory, cultural dynamics, cultural engineering, cultural performance, cybernetics, digital authoritarianism, digital propaganda, emotional manipulation, fear and belonging, fear-based politics, identity formation, identity politics, ideological contagion, information warfare, learned behavior, mass mobilization, mass persuasion, mass psychology, media ecology, memetic transmission, narrative control, networked persuasion, performative politics, political manipulation, political psychology, political technology, power and influence, propaganda systems, social conformity, social control, social psychology, societal polarization, systemic risk, systems theory, technological influence, technological mediation

cybernetics

Cybernetics: Good Intentions, Bad Vibes

Post author By G
Post date Jan 27, 2026
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The language of the school was expansive: culture, power, technology, ethics, ecology, gender, indigeneity, diversity, human experience, systems, responsibility, complexity. It spoke fluently about uncertainty, fragility, and care. It marketed itself as a space for deep reflection on and constructive engagement with how technological systems were and are reshaping civilisation. But in one all-staff meeting, […]

Tags academic publishing, adversarial politics, aesthetic critique, AI slop, ANU, Australian universities, biodiversity, Canberra, climate and governance, communication systems, complexity theory, corporate power, cultural politics, cybernetics, diversity discourse, epistemic uncertainty, ethics and technology, feedback loops, field logic, forests and ecology, gender and culture, governance, human experience, indigeneity and culture, institutional culture, knowledge institutions, language and meaning, learning and recovery, legitimacy economy, media ecology, metabolic systems, natural systems, op-ed, organizational continuity, organizational metabolism, post-truth systems, power dynamics, public intellectualism, recursive power, resilience, stroke recovery, structural critique, system blindness, systemic capture, systems ecology, systems thinking, technocracy, technological leviathan, truth and doubt, unintended consequences, wildlife symbolism

Philosophy

Theory of Language and Communication

Post author By G
Post date Jan 25, 2026
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Formal Abstract This document presents a formal, process-based theory of language, information, and dynamic meaning systems. Communication, cognition, identity, legitimacy, and truth are treated not as static entities but as temporally constituted processes sustained through repetition, coupling, and feedback within distributed fields. A minimal axiom set grounded in acts, timing, coupling, recursion, variation, and emergent […]

Tags adaptive-systems, algorithmic systems, applied cybernetics, artificial intelligence and communication, cognitive systems, communication ecology, communication systems, communication theory, complex systems, complexity philosophy, control theory, coupling dynamics, cultural dynamics, cultural systems, cybernetic governance, cybernetics, disinformation theory, distributed cognition, dynamic meaning, emergence, emergent order, entropy and variation, epistemic systems, Epistemology, feedback systems, field theory of meaning, formal systems theory, general theory of language, Global Systems, governance systems, identity systems, information systems, information theory, institutional systems, legitimacy dynamics, meaning systems, meaning-formation, media ecology, network dynamics, nonlinear-dynamics, Ontology, phase dynamics, philosophy of information, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of technology, political communication, political economy of information, process ontology, recursion, reflexive governance, resilience theory, semantics, social cybernetics, social systems, structural dynamics, system coherence, systemic risk, systems collapse, systems design, systems intelligence, systems modelling, systems theory, technological mediation, temporal systems, theoretical cybernetics, truth and legitimacy, unified systems framework

Uncategorized

The Game

Post author By G
Post date Jan 25, 2026
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Systems of governance and regulation, insofar as they attempt to secure social, economic, and existential continuity, are structurally compromised. Their primary function is not effective service delivery, but the preservation of administrative and status hierarchies. Continuity of role, office, and influence comes first; the public good follows, if at all. Politics becomes theatre. Institutions become […]

Tags administrative bloat, bureaucratic inertia, civilizational breakdown, civilizational risk, communication systems, complex systems, cultural decline, cybernetics, existential crisis, financial power, future collapse, global instability, governance reform, governance-failure, greed, higher education collapse, inequality, information overload, institutional critique, institutional decay, institutional self preservation, knowledge suppression, late capitalism, media ecology, political dysfunction, political economy, power concentration, regulatory failure, social fragmentation, status hierarchy, structural tragedy, sustainability failure, systemic collapse, systemic risk, systems theory, technocracy critique, technocratic governance, technological mediation, university crisis

cybernetics

Power, Politics, Policy

Power no longer argues; it pre-configures the field. That matters because political economy now unfolds inside communicative and technological environments that behave less like instruments of choice and more like complex systems seeking autonomously self-propagating continuity. Policy disputes over reform, productivity, welfare, housing, climate, or security feel intentional and contested, yet they mostly convert disagreement […]

politics

Writing on Politics

Writing about contemporary politics, especially what is now unfolding globally and with particular intensity in the United States, has become an aesthetically risky and expressively constricted act. Insight itself is treated as partisan. Intelligence, systems thinking, and even basic factual literacy are read as “progressive” positions regardless of intent or content. This is not simply […]

Tags algorithmic amplification, democratic fragility, democratic tension, epistemic collapse, epistemic vulnerability, factionalization of reason, identity politics, media ecology, monoculture imagery, national branding, polarization, political communication, post-truth, propaganda dynamics, public discourse, systems thinking, technological mediation, tourism as political signal

cybernetics

On the Structural Limits of Political Language

Post author By G
Post date Jan 10, 2026
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Victor Klemperer’s The Language of the Third Reich was written under conditions that were materially, professionally, and existentially constraining. As a Jewish academic in Nazi Germany, he was excluded from public life, subject to surveillance, and deprived of institutional protection. The book did not emerge as a theoretical project but as a record: observations accumulated […]

Tags administrative language, algorithmic language, attention economy, authoritarian language structures, authority and compliance, automatic uptake, boundaries and systems, brittle systems, bureaucratic discourse, causal structures in communication, coherence versus adaptability, collapse dynamics, collective identity formation, communication systems, complex adaptive systems, conflict semiotics, control and coordination, crisis communication, cybernetics, definitional circularity, delay and meaning, differentiation and identity, displacement of uncertainty, entropy in social systems, feedback loops, field logic, frequency domain thinking, ideology and language, language and governance, language and stability, language and violence, language under pressure, linguistic alignment, logic and structure, managed uncertainty, meaning and causality, media ecology, non-coincidence principle, organizational sensemaking, philosophy of language, philosophy-of-systems, platform governance, political communication dynamics, political fragility, political language analysis, political philosophy, post-linguistic semiotics, pre-interpreted language, pre-symbolic meaning, propaganda mechanisms, psychological dissonance, psychology of certainty, recursive systems, reflexive interpretation, self-reference in language, semantic compression, semantic degradation, semiotics and power, signal and reception, structural entropy, structural instability, structural realism, system dynamics, system environment distinction, systems theory, technological mediation, temporal structure of meaning, tribal cognition, uncertainty and ambiguity, utterance and interpretation, war and language

cybernetics

Field Logic and Semiotics

Post author By G
Post date Jan 10, 2026
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This essay advances a limited but precise claim: meaning in communicative systems depends on structured delay, and that delay is constitutive of causal relations rather than incidental to them. Where there is a point of emission and a point of reception, the signal that passes between them is not merely a connector. It participates in […]

Tags algorithmic governance, attention economy, authoritarian language, boundaries and systems, causality in politics, communication collapse, communication fields, communication systems, complex adaptive systems, conflict semiotics, control and coordination, control society, coordination vs adaptability, crisis governance, cybernetics, delay theory, democratic fragility, differentiation theory, entropy and governance, environment and system, feedback loops, field logic, identity and difference, ideology and language, information and power, institutional dynamics, language and violence, language under pressure, meaning and causality, meaning production, media ecology, non-coincidence, organizational theory, phase difference, platform politics, policy communication, political acceleration, political communication, political entropy, political systems analysis, political theory, post-linguistic semiotics, power and meaning, pre-symbolic meaning, propaganda dynamics, recursive systems, self-reference, semantic compression, semantic degradation, semiotics, sign theory, signal and receiver, signal propagation, strategic communication, structural entropy, structured delay, systems collapse, systems theory, technocracy critique, uncertainty displacement, war and language, war systems analysis

cybernetics

Populism

Post author By G
Post date Jan 6, 2026
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What we are dealing with is not primarily a moral or semantic crisis, even though it is experienced that way. Planetary-scale communication systems behave like physical systems with dense feedback and high throughput: they develop statistical biases toward states that reproduce the conditions of their own continuation. These systems have ontic reality—that is, they are […]

language

Symbolic Traffic

Language is a game in which winning, or apparent success, is characterised, celebrated, and sustained by the relational value of tokens within it. What actually wins is the communication system itself. Human projects, without exception, are functions of belief within language, of language. Success is the generation of more language. Wealth, politics, and sociocultural dominance […]