Peace is not merely difficult. We have built institutions, identities, economies and languages whose coherence depends upon the persistence of conflict.
Tag: power
A civilisation builds systems to solve its problems, then discovers that the systems have become the problems, while its dependence upon them has made their continuity deeply problematic.
Institutions study the world remarkably well. The harder problem is that the world they are studying is also inside the building, and there is no position outside the system from which that entanglement simply disappears.
The current US President destabilised one of the most tightly coupled junctions on Earth, then seemed surprised when the consequences spread. The deeper problem is that political, ideological and socioeconomic systems often reproduce themselves through the disorder they create.
Every attempt to secure one part of the world changes the conditions of security for everyone else. Endlessly.
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WTF
We keep telling the same stories in different ways. The faces, crises and characters change. The same tribal pattern keeps finding new forms.
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A Theory of Dickheads
Everyone knows a dickhead. The interesting question is why the conditions that generate them do so, enduringly, and with such uncanny frequency.
We are passing a turning point at which the value of human cleverness becomes actively obscured and wilfully excluded by technocratic over-reach.
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AI isn’t coming to save us
AI can not save us, but it will facilitate a vast amount of short-term profit. The actual human and environmental cost will be considerable.
Much of what capitalism conditions us to fear in communism is what concentrated capitalism already does: centralise power, narrow freedom, restrict opportunity and preserve poverty as structural necessity.
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the strange ontology of power
Extreme wealth is not independence. It is an unusually successful dependence upon everyone else.
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status hierarchy: role-play
Perceived importance is simply the output function of an ongoing game of organisational status hierarchy, social roleplay and meritocratic make-believe.
