Every system—whether it’s a company, a community, or a whole civilisation—depends on relationships. We often imagine these relationships as simple connections, like lines on a chart running from point A to point B. But that’s not how they actually work. The real action is in the patterns that form when many relationships overlap. Like the […]
The uproar around immigration is less about migration itself than about the structural turbulence of complex systems diffusing toward equilibrium. Blaming newcomers is the lowest common denominator because it provides a ready-made, simplified narrative—one that maps frustration onto visible targets rather than onto the more abstract dynamics of monopolistic economics, institutional inertia, or technological disruption. […]
Political movements today often spring from communities with legitimate grievances, but the translation of hardship into narrative rarely follows truth. Instead, it flows through the machinery of technology, where statistical effects drive visibility and outrage. What begins as frustration becomes restructured by algorithms into repetition, amplification, and distortion. This environment does not reward accuracy but […]
Power is often framed as success: a visible sign of influence, wealth, and control. Yet what is celebrated locally as coherence—a leader’s authority, a nation’s strength, a company’s dominance—depends on incoherence at the global scale. For every gain of control, there is a widening asymmetry elsewhere. This is not accidental but structural: power sustains itself […]
Organizations routinely announce their commitment to transformation, innovation, and adaptability. They build glossy strategies, launch “future-focused” initiatives, and proclaim agility as their core value. Yet in practice, the opposite emerges: the institutions most loudly declaring innovation are often the most rigid. What blocks them is not lack of intelligence, talent, or resources—it is the stifling […]
American democracy was founded on lofty ideals of representation, balance of powers, and the rule of law, yet from the beginning it carried deep inequities. Slavery, the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, and the exclusion of women and the poor from genuine participation revealed that justice was never evenly shared. Tocqueville, writing in the 1830s, saw […]
History shows that evil is often less a grand design than the byproduct of ordinary negligence. Hannah Arendt called it the “banality of evil” — Eichmann sending millions to death not out of demonic hatred but bureaucratic obedience. Psychologists like Stanley Milgram demonstrated how everyday people, given orders, would administer lethal shocks rather than resist […]
Complex systems persist by inhabiting, invoking, sustaining nonlinear properties, where strict predictability collapses into fragility but feedback loops and fluctuating adaptations sustain continuity. Non-linearity here is less a mathematical technicality than an ontological geometry: the system thrives on unpredictability, dispersing shocks across distributed pathways and drawing from entropy itself as both constraint and medium. This […]
Academia abhors cleverness—but only the kinds that don’t reproduce its current coinage of acceptable thought. What gets protected is the signalling, not the insight. Language becomes currency; cleverness that fails to replicate the prevailing mintage of disciplinary and political vocabulary is filtered out. It’s not conscious—most of the time, it’s reflex. The institution doesn’t select […]
Because awareness reveals the trap: that every structure of understanding is made of the same thing it seeks to describe. Language isn’t just the medium—it’s the system. Identity, meaning, time, even agency—these are recursive artefacts of the medium’s need to stabilise itself. And when you see it, really see it, the illusion doesn’t dissolve—it calcifies. […]
Political systems orbit themselves—never whole, never closed. They produce local alignments: shared language, policy, identity, but only by scattering unresolved tension across their surface. The more tightly coherence is asserted in one region, the more distortion accumulates elsewhere. Boundaries harden, but meaning seeps through; authority centralises, but contradiction diffuses along the edges. Every declaration of […]
The world’s on fire and everyone’s selling marshmallows. I’m sitting here, half in disbelief, half in deja vu, watching the carnival of catastrophe roll on like it’s just another Tuesday. People are making obscene amounts of money monetising distraction, denial, and dopamine, while whole populations are quietly erased beneath the algorithmic rug. It’s not just […]
Daedelus Kite 