Tag: technology

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 […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Entropy of Simplicity: Language, Ideology, and the Field

The rise of rigid ideology is a reciprocal function of the simplicity of the language with which it embellishes itself. This is not a moral judgement, nor an apologetic for autocracy, but a statistical inevitability: simplicity wins because simplicity persists. Such narratives are not the only dynamics at work, but they gain disproportionate attention. Words […]

Categories
cybernetics

Dispatches from the Loop: The Illusion of Privacy

There is no privacy. That’s the first line, the one nobody wants to read, but it’s true enough to carry the weight of the whole argument. What we call privacy now is a commercial product, a marketable illusion. Platforms sell the promise of protecting what they already capture. Governments legislate rights they cannot enforce. We […]

Categories
cybernetics

Technological Change and Institutional Stasis

The institutions that claim to be the guardians of knowledge—universities, governments, large corporations—have all become deeply entangled in their own logic of continuity. Universities in particular once positioned themselves as sanctuaries for critical thought, but the reality today is closer to Stafford Beer’s observation in Platform for Change (1975): organizations tend not to innovate, they […]

Categories
cybernetics

Immigration Insecurity

The uproar around immigration is less about migration itself than about the structural turbulence of complex systems diffusing toward equilibrium. Blaming newcomers is the lowest common denominator because it provides a ready-made, simplified narrative—one that maps frustration onto visible targets rather than onto the more abstract dynamics of monopolistic economics, institutional inertia, or technological disruption. […]

Categories
Philosophy

Frequency over Fact: Sociopolitical Diffusion

Political movements today often spring from communities with legitimate grievances, but the translation of hardship into narrative rarely follows truth. Instead, it flows through the machinery of technology, where statistical effects drive visibility and outrage. What begins as frustration becomes restructured by algorithms into repetition, amplification, and distortion. This environment does not reward accuracy but […]

Categories
Philosophy

Innovation?

Organizations routinely announce their commitment to transformation, innovation, and adaptability. They build glossy strategies, launch “future-focused” initiatives, and proclaim agility as their core value. Yet in practice, the opposite emerges: the institutions most loudly declaring innovation are often the most rigid. What blocks them is not lack of intelligence, talent, or resources—it is the stifling […]

Categories
cybernetics

Objective Function of Machine Learning

Studying machine learning now looks less like a steady ascent and more like an asymptotic orbital reference frame perennially caught in and constrained between attraction and repulsion. The desire is centripetal, a pull towards the imagined centre of mastery and promise, but the structure itself functions centrifugally, casting people back out, denying arrival. The gap […]

Categories
cybernetics

Friendship

Friendship is slipping further into mediation, filtered through technologies and codified social structures. The weight of loneliness grows as connections are rerouted into circuits and systems that promise togetherness but deliver distance. In the unfolding horizon, the future looks stripped of unmediated presence, leaving companionship as an echo carried by machinery. Systems themselves betray the […]

Categories
cybernetics

When Technology Owns Our Experience More Than We Do

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 […]

Categories
cybernetics

Swallowed Whole: Big Tech pwns Education

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 […]

Categories
Philosophy

Zak Stein: AI, Education, Regulation

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 […]