Categories
cybernetics

Australia Bets the Future on Big Tech’s “Trust Us” Doctrine

Context: Artificial intelligence to be managed through existing laws as Australia unveils national AI plan Australia has chosen to manage artificial intelligence through “existing laws” and “industry-led standards,” a position repeated across today’s public messaging: flexible oversight, voluntary guardrails, and a promise that the newly announced AI Safety Institute will advise, not constrain. Ministers point […]

Categories
Philosophy

We are so screwed…

The billionaires building post-democratic profit engines imagine themselves as steering civilisation, yet they are only short-lived beneficiaries of an autonomously self-propagating communicative field — a system that grows by converting every message, conflict, and gesture into more of itself. The field seeks lower-energy equilibrium, shedding complexity wherever it can, and in that descent it amplifies […]

Categories
cybernetics

Drift

Autonomous technological systems now routinely adjust themselves through internal feedback: machine-learning pipelines that retrain on their own outputs, trading algorithms that react to price movements they partly create, recommendation systems that optimise engagement based on the behaviours they induce. Human input still exists, but it is sampled as data, not held as authority. Governance happens […]

Categories
Philosophy

Creativity Matters

Expressing ideas with, without, through, or as technological mediation isn’t the issue. The trouble begins with what we expect that mediation to deliver. The moment we try to instrumentalise the whole field—writing, sharing, signalling, transmitting—we quietly become the instrument. We become the relay. The medium. A carrier for systems and incentives that were never ours […]

Categories
cybernetics

Coherence through Contradiction: A Game of Words

Civilisation runs on language. Every system we build—laws, markets, machines, minds—depends on describing the world in order to act within it. Yet the world always moves first. The act of catching up is not a flaw but the essence of thought: meaning arises in pursuit, not possession. The delay—between what is and what can be […]

Categories
cybernetics

Language

Abstract: This essay explores how civilisation’s systems—political, economic, and technological—emerge from a mistaken belief that language contains the world, when in truth the world contains our descriptions. The error of equating description with reality is not an isolated flaw but endemic to the distributed, manifold-like topology of semantics itself: uncertainty is not peripheral but woven […]

Categories
Philosophy

Dracula: The Dark Compass

It was a poor family’s living room, perhaps middle-aged in its furnishings—brown vinyl couch, lace curtains, the dull hum of the refrigerator cutting through the silence. Count Dracula stood in the doorway, narrating the long drift of history to the wife of the man he had just turned, consumed as undead. “I knew the future […]

Categories
Philosophy

Immigration Insecurity

Note to self:Conflict over immigration is, before all else, conflict. If not immigration, it would be something else. The issue is not the object but the structure—how difference is processed, amplified, or suppressed within the communicative field. I study communication, language, and complex systems: how we understand what is happening to us through logic, physics, […]

Categories
cybernetics

Techno-Optimism is Bullshit

Look around. Corporate technology thrives most when you, generally, do not. Marketing doesn’t sell a device; it sells your susceptibility. Insecurity is the fuel that keeps the machine running—devouring collective futures for short-term gain. Vulnerability has been rebranded as strength. The global condition, though perhaps not entirely or irreparably inevitable, now profits from your dissatisfaction—refining […]

Categories
cybernetics

Algorithmic Feedback Homogenises Behaviour

Algorithmic feedback homogenises behaviour. Through recursive repetition, systems compress difference, rewarding only what performs commercially—what can be predicted, packaged, and sold. The loop amplifies its own reflection, turning attention into product and behaviour into data. What begins as a measure of preference becomes its manufacture. Mathematical convergence underwrites the machinery: efficiency as faith, entropy as […]

Categories
cybernetics

Threads

In every century, a new medium discovers how easily it can puppet the collective mind. The printing press made possible both Luther’s Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War; the telegraph and newspaper incubated nationalism; radio begot the theater of fascism; television normalized consumption as faith—and vice versa. Each era mistakes its medium for enlightenment until […]

Categories
Philosophy

Holism: Everything, Everywhere, All at Once

From the outset, holism concerns not wholes but the strange seam between parts. From Plato’s Forms and Spinoza’s substance to cybernetics, ecology, and dynamical systems, holism persists as an intuition of unity. Each turn sought not larger aggregates but subtler grammars of interaction—non-linear feedbacks, attractor basins, emergent orders. Unorthodox approaches—Prigogine’s dissipative structures, Bohm’s implicate order, […]