Populism may not need to be manufactured. An overwhelmed communication system already rewards simplification, antagonism and recurrence, while those best placed to change it profit from the resulting volatility.
Trump depends upon the opposing media he seeks to exclude. Its opposition generates the conflict through which his political identity acquires force. The wizard needs the curtain, but he also needs someone on the other side insisting that we look behind it.
We keep telling the same stories in different ways. The faces, crises and characters change. The same tribal pattern keeps finding new forms.
Technocratic complexity and populist caricature are parts of the same feedback loop. Each produces the conditions that sustain the other.
Can the relationships supporting ordinary life continue to reproduce themselves under increasingly rapid change?
A system can become so effective at measuring, managing, and reproducing its own internal assumptions that it gradually loses the ability to perceive the external reality those assumptions were originally created to address.
The rise of large language models has revived old questions about intelligence, utility, and personhood, but under altered conditions. From early ideas like the Turing test onward, personhood has been framed less as inner depth than as sufficient performance. What feels newly consequential is that systems designed to model, explain, and assist human experience increasingly […]
Pyrrhic Victory (n.) A triumph won at such devastating cost to the victor that it is tantamount to defeat. By extension: a situation in which short-term gains are pursued in a manner that annihilates the very foundation from which those gains are drawn. Applied sense:To turn one’s own country into a bonfire for profit — […]
Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980), the Canadian media theorist and #philosopher, was best known for his provocative #insights into how media shape perception, culture, and #consciousness. His aphorism, “the medium is the message,” wasn’t merely a clever turn of phrase; it captured his core belief that the form of a medium embeds itself in the message, altering […]
“I’m just sitting here watching the wheels go round…” The 2024 US election is an interesting historical inflection point, quite clearly bordering on hysterical in some regards. The fuel of both political continuity and change is stochastic difference, not unity – a tough pill to swallow. A simple enough concept and yet rendered as almost […]
This is, among other things, a relatively succinct description of the (current, Global) communications system drift through combinatorial entropy into the more probable states of relatively meaningless yet optimally reconfigurable (as modular) noise. High frequency, low fidelity narrative artifacts (and all who sail in them) don’t become completely meaningless signals, but they come to share […]
What is known (or is believed to be known) varies, adapts and undergoes the relentless metamorphosis of entangled streams of intersubjective abstraction we experience as cultural (and now, explicitly, technological) reality, but amongst all this effervescing percolation and uncertain intentions of identity and difference there remains a constant. The song, that is, remains the same […]
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