Having watched the world’s most powerful nation fall backwards into the plumbing of populist discontent, Australia now seems oddly determined to follow, enthusiastically participating in its own self-flushing disaster.
Tag: political communication
Malakacene: the long historical moment in which technologically mediated societies stopped selecting primarily for competence, wisdom, restraint, and institutional responsibility, and instead became increasingly vulnerable to the rapid propagation of spectacle, grievance, aggression, narcissism, and performative certainty masquerading as leadership.
Technologically mediated democracies are invoking remedial, simplified political coherence faster than they are generating the intelligence and/or aptitude required to govern the accelerating complexity of contemporary socioeconomic experience.
They paint themselves into a hyper-simplistic corner because simplified narratives feel stabilising during periods of systemic uncertainty. But once political language collapses into slogans, binaries, and permanent outrage, the capacity to think strategically about complex realities begins to erode. The rhetoric that initially appears empowering gradually becomes constraining. Every new problem must be forced through […]
Cognitive bandwidth becomes cultural destiny because the carrying capacity of technologically mediated communication systems exceeds the carrying capacity of the biological minds living inside them.
Categories
Silmarillion Dissimulation
What is striking here is not merely that the system produced a competent paragraph, nor even that it produced a coherent philosophical reflection from a compressed prompt. The more consequential event is that the generated artifact possesses properties usually associated with accumulated cultural and intellectual maturation: layered symbolism, emotional calibration, historical compression, aesthetic continuity, recursive […]
Categories
The Middle Earth war continues…
The strange thing about prolonged conflict is not merely that it destroys. It reorganises perception. After enough cycles of outrage, retaliation, spectacle, counter-spectacle, sanctions, declarations, precision strikes, televised rubble, algorithmic tribalism, and strategic ambiguity, entire populations begin navigating reality through symbolic compression rather than direct experience. The war ceases to be geographically localised and instead […]
Across much of the world, political communication has become increasingly volatile, distrustful, reactive, and emotionally saturated. This is usually interpreted as a moral or ideological failure within populations themselves, yet at least part of the phenomenon may instead arise from the underlying geometry of large-scale communication systems whose structures increasingly reward reproducibility, emotional intensity, and […]
The Coalition’s recent turn on immigration should not be read only as a policy announcement. It is better understood as a communication event in which a party under pressure has reached for one of the oldest political instruments available: the conversion of broad social anxiety into a visible outsider. In its own language, the Coalition’s […]
Categories
Populism as Data Infrastructure
Populist tribalism is not merely a political mood. It is a communication environment unusually rich in signal, repetition, affect, antagonism, identity, fear, loyalty, humiliation, accusation, and recurrence. This matters because large digital platforms are not neutral carriers of public feeling. Their commercial systems depend on sustained engagement, behavioural prediction, data extraction, and increasingly fine-grained user […]
Categories
Barnaby’s Choice
Reports today have drawn attention to remarks by Barnaby Joyce comparing immigration flows to livestock management, a framing criticised for both its tone and its implications. Whatever the intent, language of that kind lands heavily in a moment already charged around migration, borders, and identity. It reduces a complex human process to something blunt, and […]
One Nation’s resurgence is real, but its diagnosis is false. In South Australia, recent results show a marked rise in support for One Nation, reshaping parts of the electoral landscape and prompting responses from major parties. The party’s core claim is simple. Migration is presented as a primary driver of housing stress, wage pressure, and […]
Daedelus Kite 