After the Bondi shooting, what unfolds across news coverage, social media, and everyday conversation is not just reaction. It is a shared system under stress adjusting itself in real time. People feel fear, grief, anger, and vigilance because something genuinely terrible has happened. Those feelings are not secondary effects. They are the human reality of […]
We are building machines that can talk, draft, diagnose, summarise, and imitate. Each month the interface becomes smoother; each week the latency shrinks. The friction that once shaped our thinking — the tiny deferrals through which thought organises itself — is being polished away. It feels like progress because the response arrives quickly and looks […]
The billionaires building post-democratic profit engines imagine themselves as steering civilisation, yet they are only short-lived beneficiaries of an autonomously self-propagating communicative field — a system that grows by converting every message, conflict, and gesture into more of itself. The field seeks lower-energy equilibrium, shedding complexity wherever it can, and in that descent it amplifies […]
Extreme wealth is not just a larger version of ordinary success. Beyond a certain point, it becomes a structural feature of the systems that organise society itself. Modern civilisation runs on coordination: finance, law, technology, logistics, media, administration. These systems manage complexity by translating the world into symbols — money, data, metrics, legal categories. They […]
Systems don’t hold their shape by conviction. They hold it by habit, cadence, and the slow accretion of tiny decisions that feel neutral while they’re happening. What we call an “economic model” or a “political order” is just a particular tuning of incentives, language, and expectation. Shift the tuning and the whole field reconfigures. The […]
Cybersecurity is usually framed as a protective shield—tools, protocols, and practices designed to block attackers and preserve trust in digital systems. Yet this view obscures the deeper reality. Cybersecurity is not simply about erecting barriers, but about managing a continuous cycle of disruption and repair. Breaches and defences do not occur in isolation; they follow […]
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 […]
Political movements today often spring from communities with legitimate grievances, but the translation of hardship into narrative rarely follows truth. Instead, it flows through the machinery of technology, where statistical effects drive visibility and outrage. What begins as frustration becomes restructured by algorithms into repetition, amplification, and distortion. This environment does not reward accuracy but […]
Friendship is slipping further into mediation, filtered through technologies and codified social structures. The weight of loneliness grows as connections are rerouted into circuits and systems that promise togetherness but deliver distance. In the unfolding horizon, the future looks stripped of unmediated presence, leaving companionship as an echo carried by machinery. Systems themselves betray the […]
The song Police and Thieves first bounced me in the middle of The Harder They Come—Jimmy Cliff cutting through the screen like a switchblade, though I later learned it wasn’t on the original soundtrack. Junior Murvin’s falsetto rides Lee Perry’s eerie dub production like smoke on broken glass, all shimmer and warning. The song isn’t […]
Prohibition, as a policy archetype, emerges from an institutional reflex: control harm by restricting access. At surface level, this seems rational. But the U.S. opioid crisis reveals its flaw with brutal clarity. Decades of interdiction, scheduling, and enforcement have not stopped overdose deaths—they’ve amplified them. Synthetic opioids like fentanyl bypass traditional supply chains, intensify risk, […]
Sociotechnical recursion is a concept that captures the deeply interdependent nature of technological and social systems. It describes how these systems are not only connected but are continuously shaping and being shaped by each other in a complex, ongoing cycle. In this view, technology is not merely a tool or a passive artifact; it is […]
Daedelus Kite 