Peace, when described in the language of institutions, is often framed as an architectural project: build the right frameworks, enforce rules, align incentives, and stability will follow. There is truth here—institutions provide scaffolding for cooperation, absorbing shocks that might otherwise fracture societies. Yet beneath this architecture lies a deeper symmetry. Both democracies and autocracies rely […]
Civilization is less a structure of stone than of syntax, less a matter of territory than of the terms by which we agree to describe and dispute it. What appears as strategy on a battlefield is only the most obvious shadow of a deeper logic: the orchestration of words, categories, and distinctions by which reality […]
In dynamical systems, trajectories do not simply collapse into rest. They can (and tend to) drift endlessly, circling within strange attractors where motion never repeats yet never escapes. Turbulent fluids, weather patterns, ecological populations, and even networks of neurons exhibit this restless confinement. What seems chaotic is in fact structured wandering, an orbit that sustains […]
Every political economy, no matter its self-image or stated goals, relies on the same underlying mechanics: extraction, distribution, control, legitimation, and feedback. These are not policy preferences or ideological signatures—they are structural invariants. Whether in early imperial systems or today’s data-driven economies, these components reappear in form after form. What differs is how they’re masked, […]
Jay Forrester (1918–2016) was an American engineer and systems theorist whose work shaped both technology and global modelling. At MIT, he invented magnetic core memory, a breakthrough that powered early computers. Later, he pioneered system dynamics, using computer simulations to understand complex systems like corporations, cities, economies, and ecosystems. His World Dynamics and Limits to […]
Fakes fly further and faster than facts because truth is not and never was the ground state of communication. Truth is IN language but it is not OF language: indeterminacy regarding semantics and truth is a primary method of linguistic system self-propagation. We should, perhaps, focus less on rubrics of culturally and psychologically self-validating (as […]
For a system to persistently self-sustain, it has to negotiate and/or “exhale” its own waste products as entropy. Generating waste that is reusable by something or someone else is all but ubiquitous in biology. Human systems (and consequences, in a scaled, industrial and technological sense) might be uniquely distinguished by the volume, diversity and cadence […]
Institutional continuity (and all that follows) is reciprocally self-defined through assertions of regulatory control, surveillance, power and – yes – strategy; an interface and communications bridge or feedback loop of some sort forms and self-sustains in this way. This mirrors many a parochial epistemology, but – is the control system and model as adaptive as […]
Context: What is incoherence? I am reminded of Kahlil Gibran‘s “a pearl is a temple built by pain around a grain of sand.” Emergent systems of frictive cognitive and partisan communications (or belief) system dissonance are inevitable in ways that serially failing to understand them is not. There is a tricky paradox here. Difficult to […]
This “race” may indeed be a descending, dissipative system and entropy dividend as a function of the overall approximation towards the median values that percolate to ascendance through the generally recursive computational processing and validation of billions of pre-existing and manufactured datapoints. Consider, please, and if you will, that what this integrated Rube Goldberg machine […]
It is of course possible to make similar observations about (many) other contemporary and earlier systems of belief. Nietzsche wasn’t restrained in such a critical context. I’m not so interested in what these systems represent, as such median hyperbole percolates to ascendance everywhere and in almost every instance dissimulates the possession of a truth that […]
The Cobra Effect of unintended consequences is the tip of an enormous iceberg of complex systems feedback loops and interdependency. It is not just the measurable, observed or recorded properties, processes and downstream consequences that concern us. Where we seek to control, shape or otherwise, and more realistically, to (minimally, if constructively) influence the arc […]
Daedelus Kite 