Wars without end, from Iraq to Ukraine, consume generations while manufacturing weapons and enemies in equal measure. Economies strip forests, poison rivers, and churn out disposable goods, all in the name of growth that hollows out the future. Technologies arrive draped in the promise of connection yet leave populations isolated, profiled, and monetised; social media […]
Conflict is not an aberration of modernity; it is the essential product of our systems. Technologies, markets, and institutions do not simply stumble into conflict—they generate and depend upon it. This is not a metaphor, but a structural fact: complex systems reproduce the conditions that reproduce them. Conflict is not a regrettable waste product but […]
The United States is currently locked in an information conflict that resembles civil war but is in no necessary way destined to become one. The field of battle is structural dissonance—egos colliding, proxies maneuvering, puppets performing. These forces can devolve into kinetic violence, yes, but they need not. The danger lies in leadership without wisdom: […]
Language does not simply mirror or constrain thought: it constitutes an environment that enfolds us, a multidimensional structure more akin to a tesseract than a tool. Each act of speech adds to its architecture, expanding the field in which perception, memory, and history take shape. Cognitive linguistics has shifted the debate beyond determinism, showing instead […]
The inversion of belonging is precisely what populism seizes upon. Those excluded or half-excluded find themselves drawn to rituals of collective affirmation, not because they generate agency but because they soothe the wound of distance. The gatherings, the chants, the slogans—all of these are not engines of causation but expressions of consequence, reverberations of deeper […]
Freedom is a word cheapened by misuse. It is invoked as if it were the license to insult, exclude, dominate, or wall oneself off from others while insisting that such enclosure is liberation. Yet what masquerades as independence becomes dependence on the harm and isolation of others, a brittle shell that requires continual reinforcement. This […]
Dating platforms and social technologies are built around the chase rather than the consummation of intimacy, emotional resonance, or the recognition of social worth. Research on dating app use has shown that the systems rarely deliver enduring outcomes, but rather incentivise continual pursuit, endless swiping, and repetition of cycles of hope and disappointment (Bonilla-Zorita, Griffiths […]
Institutions are adept at naming their own failures but structurally incapable of addressing them. The bureaucratic cycle rewards discussion, reports, committees, and procedures that extend problems rather than resolve them. What gets called “management” is often the art of sustaining a tolerable stalemate, a perpetual negotiation that keeps the machinery alive without meaningfully engaging the […]
Conflict emerges not as a necessity but as a probabilistic orientation, seeded by inherited biological reflexes and cultural traditions that tilt cognition toward opposition. The self-determining narratives that grow from this inclination reinforce and entrench opposition until behaviours and thought patterns sustain the narrative above and beyond any substantive rationale for it. Evolutionary pressures honed […]
The strange game of personal, digital (ie cybersecurity) hygiene is a mirror turned back on itself. Someone might believe that they are essentially protecting personal data, identity, security — but in truth what is being protected are the very contours of surveillance and extraction required by the (ie world, integrated) communications system. Every password, every […]
Analysis is always double-edged. To describe how a system functions is also to provide a how-to, a cookbook for replication. You don’t need to intend it. The moment you show how the parts connect, you’ve revealed the pattern, and anyone watching can use that knowledge to tighten the loop. This isn’t limited to ideology or […]
Extreme economic doctrines—whether right or left—are structural performances, temporary galvanizations around dysfunction. They flare precisely because they replicate the fractures that sustain them. What appears as crisis-management is, in fact, a choreography of failure made durable. The intentional destruction of poverty is not an error of policy but a condition of possibility for wealth at […]
Daedelus Kite 