A healthy society expects children to become adults. An unhealthy one encourages adults to remain immature.
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pity the children
Tag: propaganda
Disinformation does not persist because individual false claims survive. It persists because the communicative relations that make those claims meaningful continue to reproduce themselves.
The ugly implication is that communicative success bears no necessary relationship to truth, intelligence, morality or long-term viability.
Facts may not be sacred in practice, but the alternative is shameless informational feudalism: a world in which power determines visibility, visibility determines belief, and belief dissociatively drifts away from the world it claims to describe.
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 […]
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Bad Words With Weapons
Language does not contain the world; the world contains language, yet impoverished meaning becomes machinery, mythology, and moral fact precisely when language behaves as though its crude categories contain reality itself.
Transnational corporate power does not merely strip-mine the material world. That would be amateur hour. It also strip-mines the symbolic order: trust, language, law, legitimacy, attention, aspiration, fear, guilt, hope, all the warm little mammals by which civilisation convinces itself it is not just a spreadsheet wearing perfume. The corporation no longer sells products in […]
Large populations have, at various points in history, rallied behind loud, simple, certainty-projecting figures who promise restoration, strength, or clarity amid confusion, even as those same movements steadily erode the very conditions upon which stability and shared reality depend, the quiet alignment between what people say, what they do, and what the world allows to […]
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Catastrophic Incompetence
He is a catastrophe, not only for the world but for himself. The pattern was never subtle. People were simply trained, over time, not to feel the full weight of it. Saturation does that. Repetition does that. A style of conduct that should have disqualified him from serious power was replayed so often that vulgarity […]
When the ambient communication system is saturated with noise, speed, and compression, ideologies that minimise internal degrees of freedom propagate more easily, not because they are robust but because they repeat cleanly. They return in recognisable form, align with their own prior expressions, and therefore hold attention. Under these conditions, order is produced less by […]
Meaning arises and endures only because experience and symbolic encoding remain out of phase, and when technology collapses that difference into immediacy and semiotic isomorphism, thought and behaviour collapse into preordained reflex, short-circuiting cognitive voltage into volatility, simplicity, and coercive transmissibility, turning language into a direct instrument of behavioural modulation.
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Inside the Cognitive War
A cognitive war is not simply about what you think. It is a war over how you think, because once the structure, code, and cadence of thought, of language, of behaviour are altered, the content becomes easy to steer. Some of these biases are ancient, natural, even necessary: shortcuts of perception, habits of inferential prediction, […]
Daedelus Kite 