Categories
cybernetics

Crime and Punishment: The Generative Structure of Law and Disorder

The machinery becomes exceptionally good at processing the consequences of criminality while remaining considerably less capable of removing the conditions from which criminality repeatedly emerges.

Categories
cybernetics

Everybody Knows: The Game is Rigged

A rigged game constrains probabilities; it does not determine every outcome.

Categories
Philosophy

Ixion’s Wheel: Technology and the Machinery of No Return

Technology keeps solving the problems technology creates, tightening our dependence on machinery whose cumulative costs keep growing and from which there is no longer any clean exit.

Categories
cybernetics

The Herd

This is the triumphal stagnancy of technological overreach: extraordinary technical acceleration coupled to an increasingly repetitive behavioural repertoire.

Categories
cybernetics

Disinformation Interdiction in the Frequency Domain

Counter-disinformation has a structural problem: engaging a message often helps keep it alive. While this is generally unsurprising dynamical behaviour, it remains widely misunderstood.

Categories
Philosophy

Belief as Harmonic Structure

Belief is harmonic structure: the recurrent pattern of timing, relation and probability through which language, meaning and experience take form.

Categories
cybernetics

What Does Education Do?

Education stabilises knowledge long enough to transmit it, even as the machinery through which knowledge is produced and interpreted accelerates the movement of the epistemic attractor itself.

Categories
cybernetics Philosophy

Civilisation: Diary of a Madman

A civilisation builds systems to solve its problems, then discovers that the systems have become the problems, while its dependence upon them has made their continuity deeply problematic.

Categories
cybernetics

The Cybernetics of School: The Stars, the Well, and the Institution

Institutions study the world remarkably well. The harder problem is that the world they are studying is also inside the building, and there is no position outside the system from which that entanglement simply disappears.

Categories
cybernetics

The Strait of Hormuz: Cascades, Delay and the Architecture of a Crisis

The current US President destabilised one of the most tightly coupled junctions on Earth, then seemed surprised when the consequences spread. The deeper problem is that political, ideological and socioeconomic systems often reproduce themselves through the disorder they create.

Categories
Philosophy systems

Persistence of Reality

Reality persists because nothing (and only nothing!) ever fully coincides with itself.

Categories
cybernetics

WTF

We keep telling the same stories in different ways. The faces, crises and characters change. The same tribal pattern keeps finding new forms.