This is the triumphal stagnancy of technological overreach: extraordinary technical acceleration coupled to an increasingly repetitive behavioural repertoire.
Tag: systems theory
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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
Persistence of Reality
Reality persists because nothing (and only nothing!) ever fully coincides with itself.
Categories
WTF
We keep telling the same stories in different ways. The faces, crises and characters change. The same tribal pattern keeps finding new forms.
A home is not simply somewhere a person lives. It is somewhere from which a life can continue.
The machinery does not need to fail. It only needs to keep working in ways that make more of itself necessary.
At the limit lies bullshit: language sufficiently detached from external constraint that its capacity to provoke another cycle of response becomes more important than what it describes.
