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.
Tag: populism
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the communicative engine of populism
The deeper question of our historical moment concerns whether large-scale communication systems can remain sustainably coherent while continuously generating the uncertainty upon which their own operation depends.
Having watched the world’s most powerful nation fall backwards into the plumbing of populist discontent, Australia now seems oddly determined to follow.
Climate change becomes civilisational risk when insurance can no longer translate catastrophe into recoverable cost.
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of red caps and lacquered smiles
The court of red caps and lacquered smiles now finds itself chained to a king who mistakes appetite for destiny and spectacle for wisdom at precisely the historical moment requiring restraint, literacy, diplomacy, patience, and institutional coherence.
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An American Error
Enter a Chorus, beholding the Republic as a cracked glass. Behold the man, not monster, but a mirror, Wherein an age, long sick yet self-amazed, Doth spy its own deformity and cry, “Lo, greatness!” He is no thunderbolt from heaven cast, But weather bred within the common air: Distrust made flesh, grievance given tongue, Ambition […]
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 […]
Populist symbolism travels by detaching feeling from place, consequence, and thought, then giving borrowed socio-psychological anxiety the dissimulating smoke and mirrors of a theatrical political and identity performance.
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Telemetry of Systemic Greed
Donald Trump’s political method appears less like governance than domination: pressure, spectacle, threat, loyalty-testing, and the constant conversion of complexity into personal grievance. The more important question may not be whether this reveals his own limitations, which are visible enough in the public record, but what kind of system could look at those limitations and […]
The Coalition’s recent turn on immigration should not be read only as a policy announcement. It is better understood as a communication event in which a party under pressure has reached for one of the oldest political instruments available: the conversion of broad social anxiety into a visible outsider. In its own language, the Coalition’s […]
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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 […]
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