Tag: political philosophy

Surveillance Capitalism

Surveillance capitalism claims to see outward, yet its deepest capture is inward. Any system that grounds authority in exhaustive data collection must internalise its own apparatus. The observer becomes the most observed entity in the field. As capture intensifies, freedom contracts. Control architectures require constant calibration and escalation, growing brittle, paranoid, and self-consuming. Power built […]

Tags algorithmic control, authoritarian systems, coercive systems, cognitive capture, complexity theory, cybernetics, data ethics, data surveillance, data-driven governance, digital authoritarianism, digital governance, empire collapse, epistemic collapse, governance critique, governance systems, historical cycles, institutional failure, institutional paranoia, modern surveillance, panopticon, political epistemology, political history, political philosophy, political power, political psychology, political theory, power and control, power dynamics, power structures, privacy erosion, social control, social systems, state control, surveillance capitalism, surveillance state, systemic risk, systems theory, technological domination, technological power, total surveillance

cybernetics

Palantir: who sees, is seen

Post author By G
Post date Jan 26, 2026
1 Comment on Palantir: who sees, is seen

Palantir begins as a word before it becomes a company: Tolkien’s seeing-stones, artefacts of vision and distance, instruments of remote awareness that promise clarity while quietly warping intention. They collapse space, compress time, and tempt their users into mistaking access for understanding. In Middle-earth, the danger is not simply that the stones reveal too much, […]

Tags algorithmic control, algorithmic governance, big data ethics, communication systems, cybernetics, data analytics, data capitalism, data power, digital authoritarianism, digital governance, digital infrastructure, epistemology of surveillance, ethics of AI, field logic, governance systems, ideology and control, information warfare, institutional power, intelligence agencies, intelligence software, machine intelligence, mass surveillance, military technology, modern surveillance, networked intelligence, palantir, palantir technologies, philosophy of technology, platform power, political economy of data, political philosophy, political technology, power and visibility, predictive policing, psychopolitics, seeing stones, sociotechnical systems, surveillance capitalism, surveillance society, symbolic technology, systemic risk, systems philosophy, systems theory, technological determinism, technological ideology, technology and power, tolkien palantir

Philosophy

Fragmentary Politics

Fragmentary politics is the largely unwitting doctrine of manufacturing and sustaining endless political and sociopsychological friction in order to self-validate. It generates adversarialism and conflict, then feeds on the consequences, mistaking turbulence for relevance and agitation for purpose. This is not strategy. It is structural incompetence: the conversion of social damage into political leverage, and […]

Philosophy

Strange Days

Post author By G
Post date Jan 18, 2026
No Comments on Strange Days

What strikes me most about the current president of the United States is a strange inversion that would be almost comic if it were not so consequential. He shows little regard for the role he occupies, scant respect for the law, and no evident commitment to the country beyond what it can deliver to him […]

humanity life

Disability Support

Disability is not an edge case that happens to someone else. It is a statistical certainty built into biology and time. Unless a life ends early, bodies age, systems degrade, injuries accumulate, genetics express themselves, and cognition changes. This is not moral failure or personal deficiency. It is physics. Entropy at the level of lived […]

Tags administrative justice, ageing, ageing and entropy, ageing and inequality, ageing population, ageing society, biology, biology and society, bodily limits, breakdown, bureaucratic systems, care burden, care economy, carers, chronic illness, cognitive decline, collective care, collective insurance, collective responsibility, community care, compassion, compassion in government, complexity in governance, decline, demographic change, dignity, disability, disability across the lifespan, disability as normal, disability justice, disability policy, disability stigma, disability support systems, efficiency versus care, embodiment, entropy, Equity, ethical governance, ethics and policy, ethics of care, fairness, human centred policy, human dignity, human frailty, human limits, human-systems, humane governance, humane institutions, humane policy, illness, impairment, inclusive governance, inequality and health, inevitability of disability, inevitability of illness, injury, institutional trust, kindness, kindness in systems, life course risk, lived experience, mental health, metrics and humanity, moral philosophy, mortality, physical health, policy complexity, policy design, policy ethics, political philosophy, population ageing, prevention limits, public administration, public policy, resilience, risk, shared vulnerability, social cohesion, social determinants of health, social insurance logic, social resilience, social safety net, social support, social systems, social trust, solidarity, state responsibility, stigma reduction, systemic resilience, systems failure, systems thinking, technocracy critique, technocratic governance, uncertainty, universal vulnerability, universality of decline, vulnerability, welfare, welfare administration, welfare stigma, welfare systems

cybernetics

On the Structural Limits of Political Language

Post author By G
Post date Jan 10, 2026
No Comments on On the Structural Limits of Political Language

Victor Klemperer’s The Language of the Third Reich was written under conditions that were materially, professionally, and existentially constraining. As a Jewish academic in Nazi Germany, he was excluded from public life, subject to surveillance, and deprived of institutional protection. The book did not emerge as a theoretical project but as a record: observations accumulated […]

Tags administrative language, algorithmic language, attention economy, authoritarian language structures, authority and compliance, automatic uptake, boundaries and systems, brittle systems, bureaucratic discourse, causal structures in communication, coherence versus adaptability, collapse dynamics, collective identity formation, communication systems, complex adaptive systems, conflict semiotics, control and coordination, crisis communication, cybernetics, definitional circularity, delay and meaning, differentiation and identity, displacement of uncertainty, entropy in social systems, feedback loops, field logic, frequency domain thinking, ideology and language, language and governance, language and stability, language and violence, language under pressure, linguistic alignment, logic and structure, managed uncertainty, meaning and causality, media ecology, non-coincidence principle, organizational sensemaking, philosophy of language, philosophy-of-systems, platform governance, political communication dynamics, political fragility, political language analysis, political philosophy, post-linguistic semiotics, pre-interpreted language, pre-symbolic meaning, propaganda mechanisms, psychological dissonance, psychology of certainty, recursive systems, reflexive interpretation, self-reference in language, semantic compression, semantic degradation, semiotics and power, signal and reception, structural entropy, structural instability, structural realism, system dynamics, system environment distinction, systems theory, technological mediation, temporal structure of meaning, tribal cognition, uncertainty and ambiguity, utterance and interpretation, war and language

Philosophy

Philosophical Alienation

Consciousness entails perspectival isolation. Subjective experience is necessarily local, bounded by the fact that one mind does not have direct access to another. Philosophy of mind, phenomenology, and cognitive science converge on this constraint, whether framed as first-person authority, privacy of qualia, or irreducible point of view. Language does not remove this barrier. It operationalises […]

Tags alienation, cognitive science, collective intelligence, collective understanding, communication theory, Complexity, consciousness, coordination, cultural theory, deferred meaning, disagreement, distributed cognition, emergence, Epistemology, existential isolation, existential philosophy, field dynamics, first person perspective, identity, identity formation, individuation, intellect, isolation, language philosophy, legibility, linguistic mediation, loneliness, meaning making, meaning without fusion, modern philosophy, non convergence, ontic absence, Ontology, perspicacity, phenomenology, Philosophy, philosophy of mind, pluralism, political coherence, political philosophy, post structuralism, privacy of experience, qualia, rationality, relational meaning, relational systems, self sustainment, selfhood, semantics, shared isolation, shared meaning, social cognition, strategy, structural difference, subjectivity, systems philosophy, systems thinking, tension, unity and multiplicity