Captain Fractal examines how political identities, media algorithms and institutional resistance to change reproduce conflict and instability.
Tag: political-polarisation
The Soviet Union collapsed, capitalism declared victory, and everyone went shopping. Now political instability is a profitable industry, foreign adversaries exploit the machinery, and the race to the bottom has become self-financing.
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The Attention Engine
Civilisations have collapsed before. What distinguishes ours is a communications economy that profits from accelerating the disturbances society must then struggle to absorb. The danger lies in a recursive feedback system that rewards instability while transferring its consequences to everyone else.
Technology at scale preferentially industrialises the parts of human nature that are easiest to measure, repeat, monetise, automate, and weaponise. Those parts are rarely our best ones.
As the world approaches catastrophic conflict, wealth and power remain invested in preserving the arrangements driving instability. Asking for peace has become almost absurd, while preparing for destruction is considered perfectly sensible.
Humanity is caught in a planetary feedback trap. Our technologies, institutions and political systems increasingly reproduce the psychological instability they intend to resolve.
Europe’s unrest is sustained by a self-reproducing system of conflict in which opposing positions become mutually sustaining and unresolved grievances become politically and commercially valuable.
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Populism Without a Populist
Populism may not need to be manufactured. An overwhelmed communication system already rewards simplification, antagonism and recurrence, while those best placed to change it profit from the resulting volatility.
A nation cannot be unified by dividing a people against themselves. The danger begins when that contradiction becomes a political method.
Technocratic complexity and populist caricature are parts of the same feedback loop. Each produces the conditions that sustain the other.
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unbalanced: political recursion
Politics is an abstraction that leverages human beings as an extraordinarily effective method of self-propagation.
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.
