Categories
cybernetics

technological recursion

Technology promised to save us effort, then quietly reorganised civilisation around the effort required to sustain technology.

Categories
Philosophy

tribal

War persists not simply because people or cultures remember conflict, but because entire civilisations derive identity, coherence, profit, and meaning from its repetition.

Categories
cybernetics

The first rule of communication systems theory fight club…

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 […]

Categories
cybernetics

Pop goes the Diesel: Energy Market Shock

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 […]

Categories
cybernetics

Cognitive Bandwidth and the Politics of Belief

Cognitive bandwidth becomes cultural destiny because the carrying capacity of technologically mediated communication systems exceeds the carrying capacity of the biological minds living inside them.

Categories
cybernetics

LLM: What is going on here?

What is happening is not “AI producing good writing.” That is too small. What is happening is that a symbolic machine is beginning to function as a cultural interferometer. It receives a compressed human signal, passes it through a vast accumulated field of language, style, myth, politics, memory, cliché, scholarship, and platform residue, then returns […]

Categories
cybernetics

Silmarillion Dissimulation

What is striking here is not merely that the system produced a competent paragraph, nor even that it produced a coherent philosophical reflection from a compressed prompt. The more consequential event is that the generated artifact possesses properties usually associated with accumulated cultural and intellectual maturation: layered symbolism, emotional calibration, historical compression, aesthetic continuity, recursive […]

Categories
cybernetics

The Middle Earth war continues…

The strange thing about prolonged conflict is not merely that it destroys. It reorganises perception. After enough cycles of outrage, retaliation, spectacle, counter-spectacle, sanctions, declarations, precision strikes, televised rubble, algorithmic tribalism, and strategic ambiguity, entire populations begin navigating reality through symbolic compression rather than direct experience. The war ceases to be geographically localised and instead […]

Categories
cybernetics

Managed Vulnerability: The Cybersecurity Sector

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 […]

Categories
cybernetics

Field Logic: A Primer

Field logic is the claim that systems do not begin with separate things that later form relations, but with unresolved relations, differences, delays, dependencies, and absences that invoke and sustain the temporary identities we mistake for things.

Categories
cybernetics

Do Not Pay the Bill and Learn Nothing: Fuel Shock, Delay, and Adaptive Governance

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, […]

Categories
Philosophy

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 […]