Categories
cybernetics

People Who Say Nothing

In political and corporate communication, vacuity is often rewarded over insight. Research in media studies demonstrates that message repetition, even without substantive content, significantly increases perceived credibility and importance (Hasher et al. 1977). Political scientists have shown that rhetorical confidence is often taken as a proxy for expertise, regardless of factual accuracy (Petty and Cacioppo […]

Categories
cybernetics

Entropy, Communication, Political System Dynamics

Entropy is not just a principle of physics—it’s a principle of communication. Information systems, whether political, cultural, or technological, don’t move toward clarity; they move toward noise. In American politics, the spectacle of Trump is less about the man than about the logic of replication. Outrage travels faster than nuance, and so outrage becomes the […]

Categories
cybernetics

Noise

The atmosphere of American politics now resembles a dense fog of ideological noise. What registers as outrage, conviction or disgust is less the product of reasoned belief than the mechanics of replication: the simplest, most virulent signals race ahead of nuance. Words once tethered to meaning drift as tokens in a saturated field, their resonance […]

Categories
cybernetics

Stochastic Transmission of Volatile Language

Language drifts as matter drifts: clustering, folding, condensing into nodes of repetition that pass for meaning. It is not even significant what the transmission medium is, because entropy finds its own channels; in the end, the medium is us—our beliefs, our institutions, our most sacrosanct assumptions. Politically this volatility is evident, but volatility is precisely […]

Categories
Philosophy

Psychological Exhaustion in Post-Stroke Recovery

Post-stroke psychological exhaustion often reveals itself less in physical depletion than in the operant futility of psychic investments once thought indispensable. Much of the energy that is demanded—whether in meeting social obligations, navigating institutional protocols, or maintaining the relational tissue of external expectations—proves to contribute little to healing. Instead, it perpetuates an endless circuit of […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Business of Political Insecurity

Political insecurity mirrors the dynamics of cybersecurity in that the act of securing does not eliminate risk but displaces it into new configurations. In digital systems, firewalls, encryption, and patches reduce certain vulnerabilities but simultaneously generate others, leaving end-users and clients to absorb the cost of residual exposure (Anderson, 2020). Politics demonstrates the same recursive […]

Categories
Philosophy

Regulating Social Media

Regulation of social media is sold as public hygiene but functions more like selective pruning in a forest that no one understands. Bureaucracies and their corporate partners operate under a control logic shaped by short-term optics rather than systemic insight. In Australia, as elsewhere, the expertise required to manage such vast, self-amplifying communication networks barely […]

Categories
cybernetics

The Necessary Distance: Why Perfect Synchrony Destroys Identity

Imagine a crowd of fireflies. Each blinks on its own rhythm, yet over time many begin to flash together. The spectacle is mesmerizing, but beneath the beauty lies a puzzle: if they all blink at precisely the same instant, the individuality of each vanishes into a single, undifferentiated pulse. This isn’t just a curiosity of […]

Categories
cybernetics

Identity as Stable Phase Difference: Order-through-Offset in Communication Systems

In large, coupled communication systems, a global phase of discourse can emerge. Individual identities persist as stable phase differences relative to that field. Identity is not destroyed by resonance. It is produced as a metastable offset that resists full phase collapse while remaining entrained. This yields simultaneous order and disorder across scales. Mean-field picture. Kuramoto’s […]

Categories
politics

Bingo

Democracy is often assumed to be more resilient than it is. What is becoming clear in the United States is that its very openness—the freedoms of speech, assembly, and communication—provide the leverage points through which anti-democratic forces operate. If democratic systems can be bent or flipped using relatively low energy—disinformation campaigns, procedural manipulation, networked mobilization—then […]

Categories
Philosophy

Cybernetic Interdiction: Social Media

Spectral Coupling and the Frequency Control Plane of Meaning Most attempts to fix broken communication start at the surface of words. They try to add more facts, more corrections, more explanation. The deeper lever sits underneath the words. It sits in time. Meaning stabilizes when patterns repeat, align, and reinforce one another. That alignment is […]

Categories
Philosophy

Eulogy

We come together not to dress the truth in lace, but to speak plainly: humanity had within it sparks, flashes, even storms of brilliance. The rhythm of its thought pulsed in breaths both shallow and profound—an inhalation of vision, an exhalation of confusion. Yet in ensemble, the cadence collapsed. What was sharp in one mind […]