It is an uncomfortable truth that most organisations exist to sustain their own inertia. Systems accumulate procedures, forms, and roles that replicate themselves under the guise of necessity. Meaning, in this context, is not produced by purpose but by repetition—the continual reinforcement of structures that justify their own persistence. The illusion of productivity masks a […]
Hyman Minsky, an economist who studied the fragility and collapse of financial systems, showed how finance is not neutral but recursive: price rises create collateral, collateral expands credit, and credit drives prices higher still. This acceleration does not move toward equilibrium but toward a critical inflection where reversal cascades through the system. Housing markets in […]
In the mid-20th century, cybernetics emerged as a radical rethinking of systems, observers, and the recursive loops that bind them. It was never a closed discipline but a method of inquiry—a tool for understanding how systems regulate themselves and how observers entangle with the phenomena they study. It cut across biology, engineering, psychology, and philosophy. […]
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 […]
We rarely pause for thought to consider that all of this accelerating sociotechnical speciation and generative utility precisely is the drift through combinatorial complexity into states of maximum entropy. It remains as something of a collective (perhaps collaborative) blindspot that organisational order is profoundly dependent upon unrecoverable loss and stochastic uncertainty. The same observation applies […]
Context: The Myth of Sustainable Fashion …and not, as it turns out, an isolated instance of an industry and integrated economic culture being so profoundly shaped by and oriented towards cultivating obsolescence and waste that it could hardly continue to exist in any kind of recognisable form without it. In one regard, this is a […]
Context: Scientist: Extent of DDT dumping in Pacific is ‘staggering’ As a species and (such as it is) a Global civilisation, we surf on the breaking waves of short term advantage while incessantly displacing cost and complexity into the future as “someone else’s problem”. In contexts such as this instance of toxic envenomation of an […]
Context: How Bill Gates’ company TerraPower is building next-generation nuclear power As a general observation, *anything* which measures safety as “analyzed by deaths per unit of electricity generated” is a worry – it is a normative expectation of inevitable fatality. The technical solution described is interesting and certainly shifts the hazards and juggles the entropy […]
Complex emergent natural phenomena (of which human organisations are a logical sub-set) possess developmental biases towards evolutionary selection mechanisms favouring systemic continuity…
Daedelus Kite 