Categories
cybernetics

Field Logic and Semiotics

This essay advances a limited but precise claim: meaning in communicative systems depends on structured delay, and that delay is constitutive of causal relations rather than incidental to them. Where there is a point of emission and a point of reception, the signal that passes between them is not merely a connector. It participates in […]

Categories
technology

Divided

Technologically mediated communication intensifies what language has always done: it isolates, divides, and distances us from one another, and from ourselves, as a necessary precondition for meaningful communicative experience to arise at all. Given the nature of the world, I carry a quiet regret at not having known more people more fully, even while understanding […]

Categories
cybernetics

Meaning: Uncertainty Disco

Meaning does not exist in words, ideas, or intentions taken in isolation. It arises from a relational system in which elements acquire significance only through their differences from one another over time. Words are defined by other words; references defer to further references; interpretation always lags expression. That lag is not an accident or a […]

Categories
language

Symbolic Traffic

Language is a game in which winning, or apparent success, is characterised, celebrated, and sustained by the relational value of tokens within it. What actually wins is the communication system itself. Human projects, without exception, are functions of belief within language, of language. Success is the generation of more language. Wealth, politics, and sociocultural dominance […]

Categories
art

Desire

Desire does not move in straight lines. It curves. It sustains itself through distance, delay, and asymmetry, forming a logical orbit rather than a trajectory toward fulfilment. What appears in lived experience as longing or pursuit is not a failure of arrival but the mechanism by which relational systems remain open rather than collapse into […]

Categories
communication

Before Words Mean: Ideological Self-propagation

Words work before they mean. Long before comprehension, their rhythm, tone, and pattern capture attention. They anchor consciousness. This is semiosis at its rawest: symbols not yet parsed but already guiding perception. A word doesn’t just describe—it arranges how the mind listens, what it expects, and where it looks. Repetition, cadence, and emotional charge cultivate […]

Categories
Philosophy

Freedom

Freedom is a word cheapened by misuse. It is invoked as if it were the license to insult, exclude, dominate, or wall oneself off from others while insisting that such enclosure is liberation. Yet what masquerades as independence becomes dependence on the harm and isolation of others, a brittle shell that requires continual reinforcement. This […]

Categories
cybernetics

Linguistic Tensegrity

Inasmuch as we exist in, through, and as language, language itself exists through us. Every action—social, emotional, political—is mediated by language, whether spoken, written, or silently structured in thought. What rises to prominence in our networks, especially in today’s hyper-connected systems, is not necessarily truth or depth, but whatever generates further propagation. Language reproduces itself […]

Categories
art

Signification Supersedes Semantics

Signification supersedes the semantics it claims as its own. The accuracy of a representation is subordinate to the act of representing. This is also how compression functions in cultural systems: it abbreviates by cross-reference, by the innvocation of possibility. The methods of system self-replication become more important than the discrete snapshots and timeslices with which […]

Categories
Philosophy

Empty

Signs (like words, information, communication systems and the dependent subjectivities that so vigorously self-propagate through them) are intrinsically meaningless. Meaning and value are relational properties of communication systems such that complex dependencies render isolated nodes (or words, even persons) with a subtle kind of productive futility. Not so problematic from the interior referential perspective of […]

Categories
culture

Psychology of Taboos

The curious thing about the psychology of taboos is that (generally speaking) the more a thing is prohibited, the more psychological currency and cultural value it (inversely) acquires, and – consequently – the more the associated behaviours self-propagate.  We might identify this counterintuitive displacement of value, meaning and fascination (or attention) as semiotic elasticity.

Categories
culture

Information Entropy and Psychological Desensitisation in Culture and Art

When the recombinatory convergence of once-distant or disparate symbols no longer shocks us, it is probably not merely because the world (and it’s inhabitants) have moved on and desensitised to the essential information entropy of difference.  It is because these once dissonant symbols share some deeper (and logical) bond. The cultural and psychological self-representation of […]