Technology inserts itself into experience by mediating, amplifying, and normalising it. What once belonged to us in the raw, unfiltered sense is now shaped by templates and signals recycled from past data points. The repetition of what is measurable and recognisable makes certain experiences feel inevitable, while sidelining the nuance that refuses codification. This isn’t […]
Australian universities now draw more than 40% of their revenue from international students, with billions funneled into research, teaching, and infrastructure, much of it mediated by digital platforms. Government support has shrunk to under 30% of funding, while tech companies capture not only the delivery mechanisms but also the analytics, intellectual property pipelines, and student […]
Zak Stein frames the personhood conferral problem as a distinct risk in education and society. Alignment asks how humans control machines, this asks how humans mistake machines for persons. As systems simulate dialogue, affect, and presence, children and adults may confer moral standing to tools. Placing AI in roles of educator, caregiver, or companion risks […]
We didn’t build technology to serve us; we built it to be served. Every notification, every post, every frictionless interaction is not the system making life easier—it’s the system making you easier to interpret. You aren’t just using the platform; you are formatting yourself into it. Your choices, your moods, your attention spans are being […]
Let’s abandon the fantasy that meaning lives in the shiny dots we poke at on our cognitive touchscreens. The truth? There are no points—only loops. Every time you think you’ve arrived at a fact, you’re just catching a system mid-recursion, folding itself into a stable-enough pattern to momentarily appear intelligible. That pattern, which you mistake […]
Language leads. That’s the hinge point—what swings open the door to everything else. It’s not merely a mirror of thought, or a tool we use. It thinks us, moves us, builds us. Once language emerged, it didn’t just describe life; it became its own strata of evolution. A self-propagating layer, viral in structure, cognitive in […]
The slow, recursive attenuation of literacy, numeracy, and general socio-affective competency is a contemporary instance of distributed entropic diffusion. This systemic informational metabolism leads to the kind of exasperated volatility and confusion that fuels partisan perseveration in political or ideological spheres. While long, complex sentences may offer resistance to the automated flattening of language, they […]
It was never intelligence they were sold—it was leverage.Not insight, not understanding—just a mechanism to centralize control across distributed complexity. Artificial intelligence was never the final technology; it was a convenient fiction, framed as an endpoint to justify expansion. The fantasy was this: that thought could be automated, systematized, and monetized without encountering the frictions […]
We’ve normalized dissatisfaction. Not by accident—by design. The architecture of digital dating apps isn’t built to resolve loneliness; it’s built to circulate it. What’s being optimized isn’t human connection but engagement metrics. Every swipe, match, ghost, or dopamine ping feeds a system that grows stronger the more its users stay unfulfilled. At scale, systems don’t […]
Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980), the Canadian media theorist and #philosopher, was best known for his provocative #insights into how media shape perception, culture, and #consciousness. His aphorism, “the medium is the message,” wasn’t merely a clever turn of phrase; it captured his core belief that the form of a medium embeds itself in the message, altering […]
What we’re witnessing isn’t collapse—it’s entropic diffusion in a hyperconnected world. As signal density increases, meaning loses its shape and becomes multiplicity. That multiplicity converges—not toward clarity, but toward attractors: points of silence, incoherence, or loss. These attractors aren’t designed—they emerge from the system’s own structure, from the way things flow when nothing can hold. […]
Lists seduce us with the illusion of order—each item a shard of clarity arranged just so, hinting at mastery over the infinite. They compress the world into clean lines and neat progressions, comforting in their symmetry, irresistible in their simplicity. In a culture tuned to acceleration, these fragments multiply, not to deepen understanding but to […]
Daedelus Kite 