Categories
environment

Holism and Climate Change

Climate change is not occurring inside a stable planetary system. It is altering the persistent structure of relations among climatic states, variables and phases, changing the conditions under which subsequent states become possible and probable.

Categories
Philosophy

Fascism as Consequence: How Communication Systems (can) Drift Toward Dictatorship

Fascism does not begin with a dictator. It takes shape through recurrent patterns of threat, identity and authority, until a leader can occupy the position those patterns have made available.

Categories
cybernetics

Failed Aptitude: Why Power Keeps Selecting the Wrong People

The scale of the consequences has changed while the competitive selection tests for authority remain embarrassingly small.

Categories
Philosophy

The Distance We Keep: Desire, Fear and the Persistence of Self

Desire and fear appear to pull us in opposite directions, but both persist through the distance they seek to overcome.

Categories
Philosophy

The Mind Is Civilisation: Psychotherapy, AI and Infinity

We are not outside the world we are trying to understand. We are (all) implicated in its disorders, participants in its reproduction, and responsible for what happens next.

Categories
Philosophy

How to Use AI Better: Breaking the Cycle of Bigger Models

The AI business model converts new capabilities into dependencies, then turns the resulting risks, maintenance burdens and failures into reasons for further investment.

Categories
politics

Beyond Politics: The Expiry of Political Systems

Political systems are historical constructions, not immutable necessities. Their persistence does not establish their continuing adequacy.

Categories
cybernetics

Communication Theory: The Irreducibility of Deception

Why Deception Is Irreducible in Communication

Categories
cybernetics

The Essence of Language

Language, like all communication systems, holds together not despite displacement, delay and uncertainty, but because of them.

Categories
cybernetics

Crime and Punishment: The Generative Structure of Law and Disorder

Crime and punishment are coupled systems that reproduce the epistemic distinction, differential diffusion and binding distance through which social order defines itself.

Categories
cybernetics

Everybody Knows The Game is Rigged: Why Social Systems Keep Reproducing the Same Outcomes

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.