Categories
cybernetics

The Strait of Hormuz: Cascades, Delay and the Architecture of a Crisis

The current US President destabilised one of the most tightly coupled junctions on Earth, then seemed surprised when the consequences spread. The deeper problem is that political, ideological and socioeconomic systems often reproduce themselves through the disorder they create.

Categories
cybernetics

A Bit of a Geopolitical Pickle: The Security Trap

Every attempt to secure one part of the world changes the conditions of security for everyone else. Endlessly.

Categories
cybernetics

political economy: the enemy in the mirror

Much of what capitalism conditions us to fear in communism is what concentrated capitalism already does: centralise power, narrow freedom, restrict opportunity and preserve poverty as structural necessity.

Categories
power

the strange ontology of power

Extreme wealth is not independence. It is an unusually successful dependence upon everyone else.

Categories
Philosophy

status hierarchy: role-play

Perceived importance is simply the output function of an ongoing game of organisational status hierarchy, social roleplay and meritocratic make-believe.

Categories
Philosophy

irony age

Every age reaches for old stories to explain new realities. The irony is that most stories survive not because (or even if) they are true, but because they are easy to transmit, to remember, to tell.

Categories
cybernetics

autocratic capture: neurotic bureaucracy

Neurotic bureaucracies do not resist autocracy; they often rehearse for it.

Categories
cybernetics

epistemic pyramid scheme

This is how a system built to produce knowledge becomes a system for reproducing the conditions under which its existing knowledge remains authoritative.