Categories
cybernetics

The Mad King

The Mad King is usually treated as a personality problem. History supplies familiar figures. Erratic rulers, impulsive leaders, volatile decision makers whose behaviour appears to bend events. Yet this framing may be backwards. Instability at the top of power hierarchies may emerge not from individual psychology but from the structure of complex social systems themselves, […]

Categories
Philosophy

World War

Interstate war continues between Russia and Ukraine, and it does not stand alone. Armed conflict and strategic confrontation persist across multiple regions at once, including parts of the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, and the Western Pacific, where tensions involving China, Taiwan, and surrounding powers remain structurally unresolved. Beyond overt fighting, competition increasingly takes distributed […]

Categories
cybernetics

Unfinished Systems

Large systems of power, regulation, ideology, and identity do not stabilise by winning or resolving the problems they address. They stabilise by remaining unfinished. Political institutions, security apparatuses, markets, cultural movements, and ideological projects sustain themselves by managing problems they cannot conclusively solve: inequality, threat, disorder, legitimacy, desire, dissent. Total control would terminate their function. […]