Categories
Philosophy

Subscription

In a world that has deeply and intractably commercialised the concept and experience of individuality, the very last thing actually required of us is to be different. We are sorted and we voluntarily self-sort into labels and categories, compressing ourselves into neat, data-ready boxes that serve as containers for self-managed subscription into vast machines of […]

Categories
politics

Australian Democracy: One Country, Many Ways

Australia works because it stays balanced. Its democracy is not built on simple agreement, but on the disciplined interaction between different ways of seeing the world. Labor and Liberal are not just rival teams. Together, they form the smallest political structure capable of holding a complex society together. Two sides generate debate, correction, and restraint. […]

Categories
cybernetics

Cybernetics: Good Intentions, Bad Vibes

The language of the school was expansive: culture, power, technology, ethics, ecology, gender, indigeneity, diversity, human experience, systems, responsibility, complexity. It spoke fluently about uncertainty, fragility, and care. It marketed itself as a space for deep reflection on and constructive engagement with how technological systems were and are reshaping civilisation. But in one all-staff meeting, […]

Categories
cybernetics

Power, Politics, Policy

Power no longer argues; it pre-configures the field. That matters because political economy now unfolds inside communicative and technological environments that behave less like instruments of choice and more like complex systems seeking autonomously self-propagating continuity. Policy disputes over reform, productivity, welfare, housing, climate, or security feel intentional and contested, yet they mostly convert disagreement […]

Categories
cybernetics

Institutional Machinery of Self-Description

Large institutional systems do not merely maintain narratives about what they are doing or why they are doing it. They stabilise meta-procedures: how statements are produced, validated, circulated, and sanctioned, because at scale the reasons matter less than the repeatability of the process. These methods become the true object of protection because they allow coordination […]

Categories
cybernetics language Philosophy

Living Inside Language

We learn to navigate the world by drawing lines through it. Self and other. Mind and world. Human and machine. These distinctions help us function, the way handrails help us walk down unfamiliar stairs. They stabilise action and expectation. But they are not where reality begins. They are not built into the fabric of existence. […]

Categories
Philosophy

2026 Technocracy: More Control, Less Comprehension

We are likely worrying about the wrong thing. The danger is not that AI amplifies stupidity, volatility, selfishness, or ideological corruption. The danger is the speed of that amplification, the smoothness with which it integrates into ordinary life, and the ease with which this acceleration is framed as inevitable. It is not inevitable. But velocity […]

Categories
cybernetics

Technology is the Problem

The refrain once urged us to expand: “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Its inversion is now the survival mechanism: Tune out, turn off, drop in. Digital platforms have mastered the art of capture. They are not designed to serve us but to extract attention, time, and revenue from us. The architecture is parasitic—every click […]