Categories
cybernetics

Stop Worshipping Wankers: Wealth, Power and the Myth of Genius

We mistake extreme wealth for extraordinary human worth, celebrating billionaires as visionaries while overlooking the collective labour, public investment and institutional power behind their fortunes. It’s time to stop confusing wealth with wisdom.

Categories
cybernetics

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.

Categories
Philosophy

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Another Upgrade

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.

Categories
Philosophy

When Things Go Wrong: Complexity, Timing and Human Systems

A humanistic philosophy informed by system dynamics: why simple solutions often displace problems across time and systems rather than resolving them.

Categories
cybernetics

Populism Without a Populist

Populism may not need to be manufactured. An overwhelmed communication system already rewards simplification, antagonism and recurrence, while those best placed to change it profit from the resulting volatility.

Categories
Philosophy

Where Are the Real Writers? AI, Writing and Dependency

The question is no longer whether writers use generative technology. It is what remains of the writer after the technology becomes indispensable.

Categories
Philosophy

Autonomous Warfare and the Faulty Logic of Permanent Conflict

We are building extraordinarily intelligent machines to solve a problem whose governing assumptions remain remarkably primitive.

Categories
Philosophy

When Everything Becomes Visible: Privacy, Power and Digital Identity

We are building a world that needs to know more and more about us, just as being unknown becomes increasingly valuable.

Categories
Philosophy

Smart Weapons, Stupid Wars: Why Peace Is Harder

The question is whether civilisation can preserve its capacity to continue without making recurrent destruction the principal instrument of its renewal.

Categories
Philosophy

Dumb and Dumber: Autocomplete the Apocalypse

We built machines to finish our sentences. Now they are helping us finish the world.

Categories
cybernetics

Failed Aptitude: Why Power Keeps Selecting the Wrong People

The scale of the consequences has changed while the competitive selection tests for authority remain embarrassingly small.

Categories
politics

The Wizard Needs the Curtain: Trump, Media and the Machinery of Power

Trump depends upon the opposing media he seeks to exclude. Its opposition generates the conflict through which his political identity acquires force. The wizard needs the curtain, but he also needs someone on the other side insisting that we look behind it.