I spent decades preparing for real inquiry — thinking that universities existed to confront the unknown. Instead, I walked into a machine that protects itself before it protects knowledge. It acts like a guardian of truth while defending hierarchy. It talks about discovery while policing deviation. The gap between its claims and its actions doesn’t […]
Our universities are not producing experts or competency, but inasmuch as they are—and where they are—it exists only as an outlier within the great goo of median self-replication to which hierarchical bureaucracy is naturally attracted. The institutional frame does not optimise for insight but for the recursive preservation of itself, absorbing deviation back into the […]
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 […]
The professionalisation of scholarship marked a decisive shift—from inquiry as a vocation to academia as an industry. Once the university became a business, its priorities recalibrated around continuity, funding, and image management. The scholar ceased to be a boundary explorer and became instead a reputational asset, a metric, a compliant node in a bureaucratic feedback […]
Universities, for all their pomp and architecture, are backward-facing institutions addicted to the rituals of their own inertia. They speak of innovation but train compliance. They gesture toward the future while embedding students—brilliant, strange, misaligned students—into the bureaucratic tedium of a past they dare not question. This isn’t education. It’s archival maintenance. The lecture hall […]
Finding myself waist-deep in a complex University degree at the moment and it is hard to get past constantly feeling inadequate and stupid. Ticking the boxes and walking backwards juggling flaming chainsaws through the cheese grater of institutional expectations while also working to support myself, I am utterly uncomfortable and quite disconsolate about my ability […]
The key selection factor for successful pattern self-replication in a transmission medium is the extent to which the information content of that message also (reflexively) supports the propagation of the integrated or gestalt information system represented by the networked transmission medium itself.
Daedelus Kite 