Categories
cybernetics

The Mad King

The Mad King is usually treated as a personality problem. History supplies familiar figures. Erratic rulers, impulsive leaders, volatile decision makers whose behaviour appears to bend events. Yet this framing may be backwards. Instability at the top of power hierarchies may emerge not from individual psychology but from the structure of complex social systems themselves, […]

Categories
culture

Minority Report

It requires humility to acknowledge that your own ostensibly unique personality, conceptual vocabulary and social self-expression might be little more than a contingent recombinatory node of meaning in a dancing landscape of shifting patterns, linguistic fields, meanings and concepts.

Categories
Alien Anthropology

An Unconscious Narrative

Unconscious and unacknowledged, the true power of narrative lies in the self-propagating autonomy it expresses – above and beyond any putative human control. We do not own the stories and meanings through which we live so much as they own us but an essential dissimulation of reflexive psychological self-definition endlessly fails, and is foundationally unable, to recognise this fallacy.