Categories
cybernetics

System Dynamics and Surface Rules: Sharkskin, Political Economy

Shark skin is a sheet of teeth: millimetre-scale placoid denticles, each with an enamel crown, dentine core and pulp cavity, rooted in the dermis and oriented from nose to tail so that one way feels smooth and the other rasps like sandpaper. In fast swimmers such as the shortfin mako Isurus oxyrinchus and other pelagic […]

Categories
Philosophy

Uncool, Cybernetics School…

What begins as an act of response—a mutation, a thought, a tool—is not designed to last. It emerges, briefly optimal in a changing landscape, then fades or fragments. But sometimes, the solution doesn’t end when the problem is gone. Sometimes the solution learns to survive. It begins to reinforce itself, not because it’s still needed, […]

Categories
cybernetics

University Lies

Universities, for all their pomp and architecture, are backward-facing institutions addicted to the rituals of their own inertia. They speak of innovation but train compliance. They gesture toward the future while embedding students—brilliant, strange, misaligned students—into the bureaucratic tedium of a past they dare not question. This isn’t education. It’s archival maintenance. The lecture hall […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Hollow Men: Global Institutional Failures

The questions being asked and the problems being solved across government, industry and the community are almost entirely superficial and beyond the general effervescence of hype and rapidly-fading excitement or media and popular interest, the institutional processes and behavioural practices we inhabit have become self-validating rationales. We do not possess any such thing as a […]

Categories
Philosophy

Blindsight and Barren Repetition

In a world that is implicitly oriented towards the replication of its own processes, behaviours and conventions, all we ever do is look backwards, and even as we travel into unknown futures yet always and already blinded by the fallible visions of a shared imagination and memory that, like systems of belief, is so easily […]