The Soviet Union collapsed, capitalism declared victory, and everyone went shopping. Now political instability is a profitable industry, foreign adversaries exploit the machinery, and the race to the bottom has become self-financing.
Tag: surveillance capitalism
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all swallowed whole
Technology cannot solve itself, because the introspective incompleteness that limits it is a function of the same combinatorial unboundedness that makes it at all possible; spoiler: we humans are similarly and simultaneously bound by identical logic.
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the phone died, the bill survived
The phone died; the contract lived on, quietly proving who really owns whom.
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Managed Peace
Managed peace is the hard, ongoing work of keeping real conflict from tipping a tightly coupled world into outcomes it cannot survive.
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Life is wonderful…
…and the world still offers beauty without asking for an account, a password, a dashboard, a technical-debt register, or a defensible reason; nevertheless, we now live inside a rusting scaffold of technological systems, each one Frankenstein-rebuilt from yesterday’s failures and sold as tomorrow’s cure. Social media is only the visible rash. Beneath it sits the […]
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Populism as Data Infrastructure
Populist tribalism is not merely a political mood. It is a communication environment unusually rich in signal, repetition, affect, antagonism, identity, fear, loyalty, humiliation, accusation, and recurrence. This matters because large digital platforms are not neutral carriers of public feeling. Their commercial systems depend on sustained engagement, behavioural prediction, data extraction, and increasingly fine-grained user […]
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Subscription
In a world that has deeply and intractably commercialised the concept and experience of individuality, the very last thing actually required of us is to be different. We are sorted and we voluntarily self-sort into labels and categories, compressing ourselves into neat, data-ready boxes that serve as containers for self-managed subscription into vast machines of […]
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Inside the Cognitive War
A cognitive war is not simply about what you think. It is a war over how you think, because once the structure, code, and cadence of thought, of language, of behaviour are altered, the content becomes easy to steer. Some of these biases are ancient, natural, even necessary: shortcuts of perception, habits of inferential prediction, […]
Australia works because it stays balanced. Its democracy is not built on simple agreement, but on the disciplined interaction between different ways of seeing the world. Labor and Liberal are not just rival teams. Together, they form the smallest political structure capable of holding a complex society together. Two sides generate debate, correction, and restraint. […]
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Policing Generative Tool Use
It does not matter whether you write with generative technologies or not. If you have no ideas, no curiosity, no necessity to think, then artificial intelligence will simply amplify the emptiness. It will generate fluent noise, decorative coherence, and nothing else. The result is regurgitated pattern-matching, consumed as novelty and mistaken for intelligence. Most people […]
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Diminishing Returns
I am withdrawing from almost all U.S.-based digital subscriptions; soon, all. This is not a symbolic gesture or an act of ideological theatre. It is a practical decision grounded in observation. Platform governance is converging with corporate and political power into a single operational field, where economic alignment determines visibility, legitimacy, and survival. The architecture […]
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Surveillance Capitalism
Surveillance capitalism claims to see outward, yet its deepest capture is inward. Any system that grounds authority in exhaustive data collection must internalise its own apparatus. The observer becomes the most observed entity in the field. As capture intensifies, freedom contracts. Control architectures require constant calibration and escalation, growing brittle, paranoid, and self-consuming. Power built […]
