Large systems rarely fail because they pursue the wrong goals. They fail because the behaviours and beliefs built to address a problem begin optimising for their own continuation instead. Means quietly become ends. Thought adapts to defend action, action reinforces thought, and the original purpose dissolves without ceremony. In some cases, this lock-in takes an […]
It is a strange and quietly dangerous habit of our age to treat peace, language, and meaning as though they arrive fully formed at the end of history, fixed as semiotic anchors to be engineered, stabilised, and installed, rather than as fragile continuities that persist only because the relations that give them form are never […]
Many of the critically defining problems of our time resist piecemeal treatment. Understanding consciousness, curing cancer, alleviating poverty, managing environmental sustainability, mitigating climate change without triggering new failures, securing digital infrastructure, managing geopolitical instability, slowing social decay, and containing the adverse effects of runaway technological growth are not separate challenges but tightly coupled dynamical processes. […]
Humanity is moving through a narrow and dangerous passage. Environmental damage, political instability, rapid technological change, and economic pressure are all rising at once. Energy use is climbing, ecosystems are under strain, information systems are flooded with polarising noise, and institutions are struggling to keep pace. A major driver of this acceleration is corporate greed […]
By the time you understand how academia actually works, you are already trapped inside it. That is the trick. Entry is sold as freedom of thought, critique, and discovery. What you encounter instead is a dense lattice of reputation management, contractual silence, risk avoidance, and procedural obedience. Say the wrong thing, name the wrong problem, […]
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, […]
Extraterrestrial intelligence is extremely unlikely to help us. Not because its existence is impossible, but because if any such intelligence were already here, and in any sense benevolent, it would have intervened long before our crises reached the planetary scale they clearly have. Short of the darker possibility that it is they, rather than rogue […]
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. […]
Intelligence is becoming a liability. Not socially ornamental intelligence, not credentialed cleverness, but actual understanding. The kind that sees structure, delay, recursion, consequence. The kind that notices when a system is lying to itself. That form of intelligence generates friction. It interrupts performance. It destabilises belonging. It exposes the hidden costs that simple stories are […]
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 […]
Service management systems are plagued by managerial failure. The primary error is the belief that regulatory oversight exists to eradicate delay, to accelerate everything. The result is a chaotic environment in which every actor attempts to displace temporal and material costs onto other people, times, and places – both within and beyond the organisation. This […]
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 […]
Daedelus Kite 