Categories
cybernetics

aristotle’s egg

Coherence emerges from the continual negotiation of irreducible difference. Discrete boundaries and differences are contingent.

Categories
cybernetics

cmd & ctrl, we have a problem

The drone is only the visible object. The real event is the combinatorial explosion of sensors, signals, decisions, delays, targets, countermeasures, and feedback loops.

Categories
Philosophy

exasperating alliteration

Information does not travel through the world like a message through a pipe. It survives by finding asymmetry, delay, resistance, and feedback — then turning those differences into the conditions of its own propagation.

Categories
Science

the conspicuous absence in science

Science has not stopped discovering reality. We have become less capable of surviving what those discoveries imply about ourselves.

Categories
cybernetics

phase control: communication, power, and the politics of timing

Change the timing and you change the structure. Communication is not merely the transfer of information through a network but the propagation of signals through media of different densities, delays, and constraints. Small temporal modulations accumulate. Phase shifts become interference patterns. Interference becomes organisation.

Categories
Philosophy

populism, unmasked

Populism is not an opinion. It is a phase dynamic.

Categories
cybernetics

strait of hormuz

The more instability surrounds the Strait of Hormuz, the more valuable it becomes. The paradox is that a prolonged conflict may be increasing the strategic importance of one of Iran’s most powerful sources of leverage.

Categories
cybernetics

trust

Authenticity is not destroyed by media so much as converted into an interface problem: a carefully arranged background, a handful of familiar signals, and the strange little theatre by which the network teaches the self how to appear real.

Categories
life

miracle of persistence

Life is not astonishing simply because it exists. It is astonishing because, against every available opportunity to fall apart, it keeps holding together and this resilience is the kernel core of its persistence.

Categories
cybernetics

populist capture: one nation 

A society overwhelmed by complexity eventually stops seeking explanations and starts seeking certainty; that is when political movements such as One Nation cease to be anomalies and become warnings.

Categories
politics

big money, small ideas: power corrupts politics

The future will not be defined by any single party or leader. It will be defined by the widening gap between the complexity of the systems governing society and the increasingly simplified narratives through which society attempts to understand them

Categories
cybernetics

technique, technology, tesseract

Many of the largest problems now confronting technologically advanced societies are not failures of engineering, they are consequences of its success.