Tag: social media

Categories
language

Short-Circuit

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.

Categories
Philosophy

Absurd Superficiality

The absurdity of the social media game is structural, not moral. Everyone is incentivised to speak, assert experience, belief, or fact, yet attention is allocated to whatever compresses fastest. To be heard, meaning is thinned, context stripped, time and place over-determined into slogans. Throughput beats processing. What looks like participation is actually a selection regime […]

Categories
cybernetics

Lattice

Meaning can be understood as relational invariance under transformation. In mathematics, invariance is what stays the same when everything else changes. In physics, such stability gives rise to conservation laws — momentum from translational symmetry, energy from temporal symmetry. Language behaves the same way: its meaning persists not through fixed definitions but through relationships that […]

Categories
Philosophy

Regulating Social Media

Regulation of social media is sold as public hygiene but functions more like selective pruning in a forest that no one understands. Bureaucracies and their corporate partners operate under a control logic shaped by short-term optics rather than systemic insight. In Australia, as elsewhere, the expertise required to manage such vast, self-amplifying communication networks barely […]

Categories
cybernetics

Identity as Stable Phase Difference: Order-through-Offset in Communication Systems

In large, coupled communication systems, a global phase of discourse can emerge. Individual identities persist as stable phase differences relative to that field. Identity is not destroyed by resonance. It is produced as a metastable offset that resists full phase collapse while remaining entrained. This yields simultaneous order and disorder across scales. Mean-field picture. Kuramoto’s […]

Categories
Philosophy

Cybernetic Interdiction: Social Media

Spectral Coupling and the Frequency Control Plane of Meaning Most attempts to fix broken communication start at the surface of words. They try to add more facts, more corrections, more explanation. The deeper lever sits underneath the words. It sits in time. Meaning stabilizes when patterns repeat, align, and reinforce one another. That alignment is […]

Categories
Philosophy

Technology of Human Unhappiness

Dating platforms and social technologies are built around the chase rather than the consummation of intimacy, emotional resonance, or the recognition of social worth. Research on dating app use has shown that the systems rarely deliver enduring outcomes, but rather incentivise continual pursuit, endless swiping, and repetition of cycles of hope and disappointment (Bonilla-Zorita, Griffiths […]

Categories
cybernetics

Uncertain Selves

The self orients itself toward abstractions it can never fully coincide with, and it is precisely this gap—the not-quite-matching—that constitutes the self. The difference is not a flaw but the inflation of the relational space within which intelligibility arises. The self is not a closed entity but the pattern of deferrals and resonances that language […]

Categories
culture

Insecure Political Identity

Conflict emerges not as a necessity but as a probabilistic orientation, seeded by inherited biological reflexes and cultural traditions that tilt cognition toward opposition. The self-determining narratives that grow from this inclination reinforce and entrench opposition until behaviours and thought patterns sustain the narrative above and beyond any substantive rationale for it. Evolutionary pressures honed […]

Categories
Philosophy

Everybody’s Talking at Me

Sometimes, when people look at me and speak, I don’t hear the words—I see the mouth moving and hear the noise, nothing more. It feels like those moments when a familiar word suddenly turns strange, hollowed of meaning, its surface exposed. I think this happens to all of us: every so often, language reveals itself […]

Categories
Philosophy

Belief Bingo: Gullibility Disco

You are being played. Not in the sense of your particular beliefs, nor in the details of what you hold to be true, but in the very act of belief itself. The machinery at work here operates on the substrate of meaning, on the automatic reflex that orients you towards conviction, significance, and sense-making. What […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Entropy of Simplicity: Language, Ideology, and the Field

The rise of rigid ideology is a reciprocal function of the simplicity of the language with which it embellishes itself. This is not a moral judgement, nor an apologetic for autocracy, but a statistical inevitability: simplicity wins because simplicity persists. Such narratives are not the only dynamics at work, but they gain disproportionate attention. Words […]