The flying car illustrates the peculiar absurdity of developing increasingly sophisticated means of getting somewhere while losing collective control over where we are going.
Tag: systems thinking
Technology, corporate power, political division and institutional decay are undermining civilisation. Understanding how these forces reproduce themselves is the beginning of change.
Japan’s cybersecurity crisis reveals how interconnected infrastructure creates systemic vulnerabilities that conventional security measures cannot eliminate.
A system that discourages difference eventually undermines its own capacity to learn, adapt and survive.
What happens when the people least equipped to recognise intelligence become responsible for selecting, rewarding and managing it?
Popularity is not a measure of significance. The economics of attention systematically rewards familiar ideas while disadvantaging those capable of changing how we think.
Doctoral research promises original thought, but the institutional machinery that recognises and rewards knowledge systematically reproduces precisely that ignorance it exists to supersede.
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The Cost of Squandering a Superpower
America’s greatest strength was never simply its wealth or military power, but the international relationships that sustained them. As Washington undermines those relationships, the world is learning to become less dependent upon America, with consequences that could be difficult to reverse.
The problem is not capitalism or competition, but the concentration of wealth and power that progressively undermines the conditions through which meaningful competition, economic freedom and social resilience remain possible.
When controversy becomes politically and commercially valuable, incompetence ceases to be merely a failure. Trump’s administration reveals how conflict reproduces authority, even at the expense of human dignity.
I went to a School of Cybernetics hoping to develop ideas about how systems organise and reproduce themselves. My experience instead prompted an unexpected examination of institutional authority, intellectual exclusion and the patterns through which institutions reproduce themselves.
Our extraordinary technological and expressive abundance conceals a narrowing of possibility, as the systems rewarding innovation and success make civilisation increasingly fragile.
