Anarchy is usually flattened into a cartoon of riots and broken windows, a synonym for chaos or nihilism. In fact, it comes from the Greek ἀναρχία (anarkhia), meaning “without a ruling principle” or “without a sovereign head,” pointing less to disorder than to the absence of imposed hierarchy. Political economy distorts this by treating central […]
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 […]
Hyman Minsky, an economist who studied the fragility and collapse of financial systems, showed how finance is not neutral but recursive: price rises create collateral, collateral expands credit, and credit drives prices higher still. This acceleration does not move toward equilibrium but toward a critical inflection where reversal cascades through the system. Housing markets in […]
Democracy is often assumed to be more resilient than it is. What is becoming clear in the United States is that its very openness—the freedoms of speech, assembly, and communication—provide the leverage points through which anti-democratic forces operate. If democratic systems can be bent or flipped using relatively low energy—disinformation campaigns, procedural manipulation, networked mobilization—then […]
Context: Neuroscientists listened in on people’s brains for a week. They found order and chaos. Brain as decentralised communications network that exists with optimal efficiency on a globally-distributed fractal boundary between order and disorder? “Specific brain networks seemed to communicate with each other in what looked like a “dance,” with one region appearing to “listen” […]
In thermodynamics, entropy is a measure of the disorder of a system. The natural bias of any ordered system system will always be to move towards equilibrium, where entropy is at a minimum. This is because a system will dissipate energy in order to become more ordered. In a complex system, entropy is necessary to […]
Fate is a word we use to cast the past (and future) as though it ever could have been anything other than sheer randomness and confusion; we assert an order upon memory or history such that we might reflexively self-define ourselves through it. Fate is another word for a hope of order, meaning or purpose […]
Thrown into a world for which none of us are or could ever be fully prepared, we are compelled to engage the interface levers, buttons and switches of culture and interpersonal complexity which always, always represent some potentially duplicitious and risky game of snakes and ladders. There are of course more snakes than ladders, though, […]
The dynamism and flexibility of language is simultaneously its strength and its weakness. This is a corollary of the abstract/logical and concrete/material extensibility that haunts technology as cyber (in)security but is by no means limited there. It is an irreducibly discontinuous symmetry of uncertainty that plagues all organisations and institutional contexts. The incessant invention of […]
Does human stupidity actually serve a sociological purpose ?
Negotiating the accelerating metamorphosis of systemic change is a problem of global salience which appears rather poorly catered for by the leviathan of legacy organisational and heuristic solutions.
Bureaucracies and administrative hierarchies possess peculiarly mischievous methods of seeking sustainment and self-justification through the endless production of usefully wasteful products and services…
Daedelus Kite 