When I was young, I was immersed in the full spectrum of popular culture—stories, myths, comics, and games that framed the world through conflict, difference, and the clean lines of good and evil. What later generations found in computer war games, I first found in Commando comics, Greek epics, Tolkien, and tabletop quests. These weren’t […]
The purpose of a system is what it does. Stafford Beer’s principle strips away the comfortable illusions of intent and moral posturing to reveal a bleak symmetry between cause and consequence. If a society continually produces homelessness, addiction, disaffection, and loneliness, then these outcomes are not malfunctions—they are the operational outputs of the system. The […]
Loneliness begins in language. Not just in what cannot be said, but in what is said and does not arrive. A sentence needs uptake to become real. When no one receives it, the words complete their neat arc and fall back like rain on sealed glass. The echo confirms existence yet withholds communion. The world […]
It’s interesting that when you get sick and fall through the gaps in regards to unemployment, social engagement, there’s no support. You’re basically thrown out as far as possible, as quick as possible, and it is made as hard as possible to come back. That is the basis upon which social value is built, upon […]
Suffering is not a mistake in the order of things; it is the order. What feels like rupture, misalignment, or lack of closure is the very condition that generates motion and awareness. Without tension, the field would dissolve into stasis. The loop persists because it cannot do otherwise, and every attempt to escape its curvature […]
Compassion, Entropy, and the Limits of Logical Systems A pattern drawn in code is no different from one drawn in sand—only its decay differs in rhythm. The digital, for all its permanence, is no less impermanent. Every transmission is a temporary suspension of noise, every system a slow yielding to entropy. There is no final […]
On Suffering, Communication, and the Institutionalisation of Despair Suffering isn’t anomalous; it’s transmissible. And crucially, it’s more transmissible than almost anything else. In the logic of communication systems, negativity spreads not because of some metaphysical malevolence but because of the dynamics of signal transmission itself. Fear, outrage, grief—they’re high-frequency, low-bandwidth. They slot neatly into channels […]
Humanity has, at scale and en masse, a profoundly insecure dependency on aggressive self-determination. This is the great unaddressed issue of our historical moment, perhaps of history more generally, and may indeed be an undecidable problem. We may not be able to unambiguously determine causal factors or clarify many of the things we really could […]
Loneliness. How can we unburden ourselves from an experience of absence? There is nothing to remove, so we can not cure ourselves of this existential affliction.
In many ways, these complex tragedies self-replicate through the trauma they invoke. It’s something that is so characteristically human that we often don’t perceive it. The systems of psychology, culture and communication that we (all) inhabit are quite naturally and autonomously oriented towards their own recursive self-propagation. A primary method of this replication has historically […]
I wonder if these guys would have imagined that the horror they were living through would be repeated again on some European battlefield a little over a hundred years later. The methods and machines may have to some extent changed but the sheer insanity and grinding brutality remain quite the same. Soldiers (and civilians) suffering […]
Bad vibes are sticky, contagious in precisely the way good vibes are but they have a tendency to persist (as memory) much longer than the experiences that invoke them. There is no doubt that evolution has predisposed us to bias negativity over positivity as a function of survival in what was once a much more […]
Daedelus Kite 