Categories
Philosophy

Technology: The Dream is Over

The dream is over. Technology, technology companies, and integrated sociopolitical communication systems are not coming to save us. They were never neutral, and they failed at the first serious encounter with technically mediated political extremism. Not accidentally. Voluntarily. They did not merely look away. They amplified, rewarded, and normalised it, all while their balance sheets […]

Categories
Philosophy

Greedy, Selfish Stupidity as Planetary Operating System

Stupidity is not the absence of intelligence. It is what remains when intelligence has no traction. At planetary scale, selection pressure favours whatever travels fastest through the channels of attention, capital, and command. Systems built to maximise replication discover that nuance is drag and understanding is latency. Thought requires time; stupidity is instantaneous. In a […]

Categories
politics

Bad News Bears: Populism in Australia

Tyrranical ignorance resurfaces not as a national quirk but as a communicative phenomenon: as complexity scales, systems collapse toward simpler signals — not because simplicity is true, but because it is what travels fastest and replicates most easily. Influence accrues to those who reduce the world to the fewest moving parts. What we’re living through […]

Categories
cybernetics

Bad Managers

Everyone in the modern enterprise claims to want innovation, but few will risk what it requires. The fear of disturbance—of deviating from the delicate choreography of compliance and plausible deniability—has become the governing logic of management. Systems now reward those who maintain appearances, not those who learn. The result is a recursive theatre of progress: […]

Categories
cybernetics

Algorithmic Feedback Homogenises Behaviour

Algorithmic feedback homogenises behaviour. Through recursive repetition, systems compress difference, rewarding only what performs commercially—what can be predicted, packaged, and sold. The loop amplifies its own reflection, turning attention into product and behaviour into data. What begins as a measure of preference becomes its manufacture. Mathematical convergence underwrites the machinery: efficiency as faith, entropy as […]

Categories
cybernetics

People Who Say Nothing

In political and corporate communication, vacuity is often rewarded over insight. Research in media studies demonstrates that message repetition, even without substantive content, significantly increases perceived credibility and importance (Hasher et al. 1977). Political scientists have shown that rhetorical confidence is often taken as a proxy for expertise, regardless of factual accuracy (Petty and Cacioppo […]

Categories
Philosophy

Eulogy

We come together not to dress the truth in lace, but to speak plainly: humanity had within it sparks, flashes, even storms of brilliance. The rhythm of its thought pulsed in breaths both shallow and profound—an inhalation of vision, an exhalation of confusion. Yet in ensemble, the cadence collapsed. What was sharp in one mind […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Denial: Profitable Deception

At every level of power and influence—government, corporate, institutional, cultural—the refusal to admit problems has become the defining problem. The failures are obvious—collapsing ecosystems, hollowed economies, dysfunctional politics—yet they are wrapped in layers of language and ritual designed to deny them. The performance of belief and positivity masks breakdown until the mask itself becomes indistinguishable […]

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

Got Tyrrany?

Tyranny is not strength but stupidity disguised as power. It thrives on the illusion of permanence, convincing itself that the bubble it inhabits will not burst. Yet every empire, every system of control, has dissolved into dust. The tyrant clings to the fiction that what they know and what they are will matter forever, but […]

Categories
Philosophy

Technical Insecurity

The strange game of personal, digital (ie cybersecurity) hygiene is a mirror turned back on itself. Someone might believe that they are essentially protecting personal data, identity, security — but in truth what is being protected are the very contours of surveillance and extraction required by the (ie world, integrated) communications system. Every password, every […]

Categories
cybernetics

Greed

The triumph of greed is not simply a matter of moral collapse but the sad, sick flowers of history, a dark blossoming in which the most heinous acts of selfish, self-determining political and corporate identity serve as an optimal transmission medium for forces and flows that precede us, exceed us, and remain beyond our ken […]