Tag: systems theory

cybernetics

insurance industry: climate, consequence, catastrophe

Post author By G
Post date May 28, 2026
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Climate change becomes civilisational risk when insurance can no longer translate catastrophe into recoverable cost.

Tags actuarial collapse, adaptive fragmentation, anthropocene, authoritarianism, cascading crises, cascading failure, catastrophe theory, civilisation under stress, civilisational risk, climate adaptation, climate anxiety, climate change, climate collapse, climate crisis, climate economics, climate futures, climate migration, climate volatility, communicative systems, complex adaptive systems, complexity theory, coordinated failure, coupled systems, crisis of modernity, dark future, democratic decline, disaster capitalism, ecological collapse, ecological systems, economic collapse, economic instability, energy crisis, entropy, environmental politics, existential risk, field logic, financial contagion, financial instability, food security, future cities, future of civilisation, future shock, geopolitical instability, geopolitical risk, geostrategy, global governance, global instability, Global Systems, global warming, housing market crash, human survivability, infrastructure failure, infrastructure resilience, institutional collapse, institutional trust, insurance crisis, insurance markets, insurance withdrawal, interconnected systems, managed retreat, metacrisis, mortgage crisis, network collapse, planetary instability, planetary risk, planetary systems, political extremism, political volatility, polycrisis, populism, recursive instability, recursive systems, reinsurance crisis, resilience, risk propagation, risk society, social cohesion, social fragmentation, social trust, societal collapse, societal resilience, strategic complexity, strategic resilience, supply chain disruption, survival politics, systemic risk, systemic-fragility, systems theory, thermal inequality, thermodynamic stress, twenty first century crisis, uncertainty, urban collapse, water security

Philosophy

can’t buy me love

Wealth is not virtue; it is often merely the moment at which exploitation, inheritance, appetite, spectacle, and institutional obedience acquire sufficient polish that the public begins misunderstanding aggregate power as sufficient proxy for strategic wisdom and true moral virtue.

cybernetics

Malakacene: The Rise of Weaponised Incompetence

Post author By G
Post date May 26, 2026
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Malakacene: the long historical moment in which technologically mediated societies stopped selecting primarily for competence, wisdom, restraint, and institutional responsibility, and instead became increasingly vulnerable to the rapid propagation of spectacle, grievance, aggression, narcissism, and performative certainty masquerading as leadership.

Philosophy

Populist Paranoia and the Crystalline Plasticity of Political Communication

Post author By G
Post date May 26, 2026
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Technologically mediated democracies are invoking remedial, simplified political coherence faster than they are generating the intelligence and/or aptitude required to govern the accelerating complexity of contemporary socioeconomic experience.

cybernetics

The Architecture of Absence

Post author By G
Post date May 25, 2026
3 Comments on The Architecture of Absence

A strong current in modern thought still treats things as if they exist first, complete in themselves, and only later enter into relation with other things. The individual. The institution. The nation-state. The market. The technological platform. These are often imagined as discrete objects possessing internal coherence, as though persistence were generated primarily from within […]

Tags adaptive-systems, complex systems, constitutive absence, cybernetics, Daedelus Kite, emergence, identity and relation, interdependence, logical orbit, non-closure, phase delay, philosophy-of-systems, relational ontology, structured absence, systemic coherence, systems theory, whole systems holism

cybernetics

Barry, from Parramatta

A technologically-mediated civilisation has built planetary systems of prediction and control around biological reflexes still calibrated for tribe, threat, status, and symbolic belonging.

Philosophy

Milburn Pennybags and the persistence of billionaires

Post author By G
Post date May 23, 2026
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There is, at present, a strange cultural requirement to pretend that billionaires are evidence of societal success rather than evidence of systemic imbalance.

Tags algorithmic culture, aristocratic accumulation, billionaire culture, billionaire mythology, billionaires, capitalism critique, civilisation and power, class inequality, communication systems, communicative environments, concentrated capital, concentration event, cultural power, cultural systems, Daedelus Kite, democratic erosion, economic concentration, economic topology, field logic, governance and capital, housing crisis, infrastructure dependency, institutional distrust, labour precarity, late capitalism, media ecology, media influence, Milburn Pennybags, modern aristocracy, monopoly board symbolism, monopoly capitalism, monopoly man, monopoly metaphor, neoliberalism, oligarchy, platform capitalism, political economy, political power, power asymmetry, private governance, public agency, public versus private power, recursive systems, semantics and power, social criticism, social dependency, social stratification, structural inequality, systemic critique, systemic imbalance, systems theory, technocracy, wealth concentration, wealth inequality

cybernetics

The first rule of communication systems theory fight club…

Post author By G
Post date May 22, 2026
2 Comments on 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 […]

Tags attention economy, bureaucratic life, cognitive burden, cognitive overload, communication economy, communication systems theory, communicative overload, complexity theory, cultural criticism, cultural machinery, cultural systems, institutional complexity, maintenance burden, meaning systems, modern alienation, modern bureaucracy, modern life, network society, recursive systems, social architecture, social complexity, social maintenance, social performance, social systems, social theory, structural alienation, structural complexity, structural inertia, symbolic architecture, symbolic economy, symbolic performance, system persistence, systemic inertia, systems philosophy, systems theory, systems thinking, technological mediation, technology and society

cybernetics

Pop goes the Diesel: Energy Market Shock

Post author By G
Post date May 17, 2026
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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 […]

cybernetics

why institutions that promise transformation become bureaucracies

Post author By G
Post date May 15, 2026
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The Institute for Transformative Futures began with a manifesto, three beanbags, and a volcanic certainty that every institution before it had been morally and intellectually compromised. Its founders spoke in the ecstatic tones of people who had recently discovered systems theory and now suspected they alone could perceive the invisible architecture of power. They would […]

power

Professor Elms’ Surprise

Professor Elms had not believed the email at first because it arrived wrapped in the soft vocabulary of institutional care. The university took wellbeing very seriously. The university valued respectful dialogue. The university recognised the importance of psychological safety, inclusion, collegiality, and shared community standards. Accordingly, concerns had been raised regarding the tone of several […]

cybernetics

Transactional Isolation as Control Plane: Social Media and the Industrialisation of Communicative Alienation

Post author By G
Post date May 11, 2026
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Social media platforms are usually described as communication technologies, but their deeper operational logic is closer to behavioural recurrence management. They do not optimise for resolution, understanding, repair, or psychological settlement. They optimise for continued return. That means the platform is not primarily designed to complete the user’s need, but to make the user come […]