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.
Tag: systems thinking
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.
Categories
The Precarity of Thinking
Ideas are fragile, and their expression more so. In a culture increasingly synchronised by fear, hatred and repetition, independent thought becomes an act of integrity, and the freedom to communicate something genuinely different becomes increasingly precious.
The story of Ignaz Semmelweis, whose life-saving discovery reveals how established practices can obstruct new knowledge, with profound human consequences.
Categories
Yes, We’re All Individuals
Why institutions, political movements and intellectual communities reproduce the same patterns of identity, conformity and exclusion while insisting on their differences.
We have become extraordinarily good at making technology better, but much less skilled at recognising when good enough is enough. Much of what passes for progress now serves profit rather than people, so deeply embedded in our culture that we scarcely recognise the difference.
A humanistic philosophy informed by system dynamics: why simple solutions often displace problems across time and systems rather than resolving them.
We are building extraordinarily intelligent machines to solve a problem whose governing assumptions remain remarkably primitive.
How lawfare converts institutional status and financial power into pressure that silences criticism and makes public disagreement prohibitively expensive.
A force built to exploit asymmetry now operates inside legal and informational systems capable of generating asymmetric effects upon it.
We built machines to finish our sentences. Now they are helping us finish the world.
Categories
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.
