Green Day released American Idiot in 2004, a punk rock anthem that crystallized the frustration of a generation living through the Bush administration, the Iraq War, and the saturation of 24-hour news. It railed against conformity, fear-driven politics, and the sense that public discourse was being flattened into soundbites. The track spearheaded the concept album […]
In 1947, B.F. Skinner conducted a simple experiment with pigeons. Grain was released into a food tray at timed intervals, independent of the birds’ behavior. Yet the pigeons developed elaborate rituals: some turned three times, others bobbed their heads or flapped their wings. They came to believe that their peculiar movements summoned the reward. The […]
Every system—whether it’s a company, a community, or a whole civilisation—depends on relationships. We often imagine these relationships as simple connections, like lines on a chart running from point A to point B. But that’s not how they actually work. The real action is in the patterns that form when many relationships overlap. Like the […]
Billy Connolly tells the story of ordering Mexican food and realising it’s all the same thing, just folded differently. He asked for something new, but it wasn’t what he expected. The waiter brought the chef, who unfolded the meal, refolded it another way, and handed it back—“There you go.” I was a postgraduate student in […]
Research shows that people are extraordinarily susceptible to suggestion, conformity, and manipulation. From classic social psychology experiments like Asch’s conformity trials or Milgram’s obedience studies, to contemporary evidence of mass persuasion through social media algorithms, it’s clear that human decision-making is easily steered. This is not an insult so much as an observable fact: cognition […]
The refrain once urged us to expand: “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Its inversion is now the survival mechanism: Tune out, turn off, drop in. Digital platforms have mastered the art of capture. They are not designed to serve us but to extract attention, time, and revenue from us. The architecture is parasitic—every click […]
Organizations routinely announce their commitment to transformation, innovation, and adaptability. They build glossy strategies, launch “future-focused” initiatives, and proclaim agility as their core value. Yet in practice, the opposite emerges: the institutions most loudly declaring innovation are often the most rigid. What blocks them is not lack of intelligence, talent, or resources—it is the stifling […]
The air is full of noise, but not much thought. Individually, people can be sharp, clever, kind. Put enough of us together and something else emerges: a soft median that drifts to the top like foam. Those who rise inside it are not the most intelligent, not the most insightful, but the ones who know […]
Bureaucracy is a dissipative structure, built not to solve problems but to metabolise them. Flows of energy, information, and compliance pass through its channels, and in passing they feed its continuity. The structure consumes instability and recycles it as order, but only order of its own kind—recursive loops of policy, paperwork, and oversight. Like a […]
Australian universities now draw more than 40% of their revenue from international students, with billions funneled into research, teaching, and infrastructure, much of it mediated by digital platforms. Government support has shrunk to under 30% of funding, while tech companies capture not only the delivery mechanisms but also the analytics, intellectual property pipelines, and student […]
That the incompetent actions of one person can spark a global conflagration is a matter of the utmost absurdity. This indicates a failure of the intellect so rampantly oblivious to consequences as to be rightly-called “remedial”. On a broader scale, just what does the historical record reveal about the catastrophic fate of autocratic systems that […]
People seem quite naturally biased towards the lowest common denominator of what is really the most absurd and idiotic of behaviours. I understand that this is hardly charitable but I’d say that this applies to all of us and even more so when we are unaware or in denial of it. Further to this, it […]
Daedelus Kite 