The ugly implication is that communicative success bears no necessary relationship to truth, intelligence, morality or long-term viability.
Tag: political communication
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aussie media fail
Theirs is a role play of analysis, simply and unwittingly giftwrapping populist-adjacent themes for broad public consumption; little on insight, big on performative role play.
Change the timing and you change the structure. Communication is not merely the transfer of information through a network but the propagation of signals through media of different densities, delays, and constraints. Small temporal modulations accumulate. Phase shifts become interference patterns. Interference becomes organisation.
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populism, unmasked
Populism is not an opinion. It is a phase dynamic.
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populist capture: one nation
A society overwhelmed by complexity eventually stops seeking explanations and starts seeking certainty; that is when political movements such as One Nation cease to be anomalies and become warnings.
As frustration with conventional politics grows, Australia is turning towards alternatives whose appeal rests less on their capacity to solve complex problems than on their ability to give that frustration a political voice.
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 […]
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. I read it as a communication event built around one of the oldest political instruments available: the conversion of broad social anxiety into a visible outsider. In its own language, the Coalition’s Australian Values Migration Plan promises to strengthen “Australian […]
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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 […]
