Things do not exist first and then form relationships. They emerge through relationships that sustain them. Identity, time and existence arise from differences that can never be completely resolved.
Tag: systems philosophy
Civilisations persist by continually reorganising themselves. The unanswered question is whether conflict, crisis and systemic collapse/renewal remain the principal means through which that persistence is achieved.
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Applied Field Logic: Climate Change
We require forms of language capable of representing continuity without losing the ability to act locally within it, models capable of preserving the relationship between part and whole without reducing one to the other.
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technological recursion
Technology promised to save us effort, then quietly reorganised civilisation around the effort required to sustain technology.
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tribal
War persists not simply because people or cultures remember conflict, but because entire civilisations derive identity, coherence, profit, and meaning from its repetition.
It took me a long time and much exasperation to recognise and acknowledge that the first rule of communication systems theory club is: do not tell people about the theory. Not because the theory is secret. Because the theory is ineffective as information. People are not waiting for a better model of the system that […]
Energy markets do not merely price fuel. They encode the recurrence structure of civilisation’s dependency on energy. Refinery cycles, shipping delays, seasonal demand, storage constraints, geopolitical tension, and futures speculation appear as price movement, but price is only the visible signal. Beneath it sits a temporal field of repeated dependence. Energy markets are not merely […]
Australia is now so thoroughly wired into digital systems that cyber insecurity has become an ordinary cost of institutional existence and everyday subjectivity, not an abnormal failure skulking out beyond the perimeter. The Australian Signals Directorate received more than 84,700 cybercrime reports in 2024–25, roughly one every six minutes; average self-reported losses rose to $33,000 […]
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Field Logic: A Primer
Field logic does not begin with separate things that subsequently form relations. It begins with unresolved relations, differences, delays, dependencies, and absences from which temporary identities emerge and persist, identities we mistake for things.
Strategic Cost Recovery. The Australian fuel shock should not be treated as a discrete price problem. It is a moving disturbance through food, freight, work, health logistics, regional supply, household mobility, business continuity, inflation expectations, and public trust. The official response has been recognisable and partly necessary: temporary fuel excise relief, reduced heavy-vehicle road charges, […]
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Afterlife
The afterlife, if the phrase is to be used at all, is not best imagined as a sentimental annex bolted onto death. Nor, however, is it something about which confidence is easily justified. What we call a life may be only a local and temporary stabilisation within conditions the person cannot comprehend or contain. The […]
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Revolutionary Phase
A system optimised for speed and extraction can be disempowered not by rupture, but by altering the timing and pathways through which it expects to operate. In a parallel timeline, change did not arrive as rupture but as reconfiguration within the platforms and infrastructures that organised collective behaviour, where optimisation systems once tuned for engagement, […]
