Technology at scale preferentially industrialises the parts of human nature that are easiest to measure, repeat, monetise, automate, and weaponise. Those parts are rarely our best ones.
Tag: sociology
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Immigration Insecurity
Note to self:Conflict over immigration is, before all else, conflict. If not immigration, it would be something else. The issue is not the object but the structure—how difference is processed, amplified, or suppressed within the communicative field. I study communication, language, and complex systems: how we understand what is happening to us through logic, physics, […]
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 […]
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Mental Health
Mental health issues are often asserted as neurochemical or physiological malfunction, located in the individual. Yet this framing conceals how distress emerges from larger social systems, which depend upon gradients of exclusion and disaffection to function. Just as unemployment is not an error but a structural feature of employment markets, sorrow and psychic fracture are […]
An interesting hypothesis is that all social processes are expressions of frequency. While not strictly equivalent, frequencies can be understood as empirical expressions of probability—patterns of recurrence that approximate likelihood over time. In doing so, they engage with dynamical attractors, stabilising tendencies within complex systems that draw trajectories into patterned coherence. The very process of […]
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Murder Mysteries
An analytical framework, as much as its denizens, loves nothing so much as a murder mystery to solve and short of the wars and (other) international intrigues that often lead to all manner of unjust killings, the forensic science of unexplained death plays a special role in cultural and media reflexivity. I do not suggest […]
It may be a matter of social and psychological necessity that this kind of monumental existential threat – to which we have perhaps long been desensitised by repetition and the droning monotony of unnecessarily adversarial ideological and political competition – carry more impact, more information entropy and cultural gravity when they become a tangible, material, […]
Why does homelessness occur and why is it so difficult to find and apply lasting solutions? In a nutshell: Entropy. This is not a rhetorical affectation but as an authentic explanatory and causal explanation. Many socioeconomic problems are complex but within a relatively limited problem “dimensionality” – consider crowd control or public transport. They are […]
The cost of order is always going to be a certain degree, presence or manifestation of disorder. The notion of a “more peaceful world” is one in which vast numbers of (relatively) small, regional conflicts proliferate, generalisations notwithstanding. There is even, perhaps, a sense in which such distributed conflict is inevitable as a displaced information […]
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Mind the Gap
Our systems of logistics and commuter transport derive the abstract, symbolic value and benefit of logical continuity from their function just as much as the commuters do.
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Uniform Individuality
Aspirations to difference and self-individuation through fashion, personal taste or behaviour are really just an evolution of tribal identity and group membership. Belonging to a group that does not belong to a group by virtue of adaptively-defined expressions and experiences of individuality is still to belong to a group.
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Inhibiting Intelligence
Conventional platitudes and “safe” research agendas actively inhibit the free flow of ideas that discovery and authentic intellectual creativity or intelligence require.
Daedelus Kite 