Daedelus Kite

Technologically mediated communication has exposed humanity in a rather unflattering light.

What if immortality is not something we acquire, but a consequence of something reality cannot escape?

We remain hominids.

Institutional incompetence fuels political opportunism.

How to Lose an Information War The protests in France may well be exploited by foreign actors seeking to amplify political instability, but that raises a more fundamental question: why were the conditions for such exploitation present in the first place?

We have built a planetary communications system in which an argument can remain profitable long after it has become socially ruinous.

We are approaching a period of global conflict whose consequences could exceed anything humanity has previously experienced, while extraordinary concentrations of wealth and power remain invested in preserving the arrangements producing this instability,…

I have spent more than four decades studying systems, philosophy, communication, complexity and consequence, trying to understand what it means to be alive in a universe, and how the extraordinary arrangements we call civilisation emerge, persist and even…

If this is how it all ends, in vast conflagration and the catastrophic unravelling of planetary life, how terribly sad that billions of years of evolution should have brought us to this grotesque absurdity, where a frightened, confused and spectacularly g…

We are experiencing a global mental health crisis, although describing it simply as an epidemic of psychiatric disorders misses the larger problem.

Corruption is usually understood as dishonesty, bribery or the deliberate abuse of authority.

Social and political systems depend upon a peculiar combination of collective amnesia and suspended disbelief.

The flying car is almost a perfect metaphor for technological civilisation’s predicament.

We are watching a civilisation systematically dismantle the conditions necessary for its own survival.

Japan is experiencing a substantial escalation in cyberattacks, with ransomware, infrastructure disruption and extensive personal data breaches affecting businesses, transport networks, public services and government agencies.

I remain genuinely puzzled by the intellectual poverty of Australian political and institutional discourse.

The Dunning-Kruger effect describes the rather unfortunate tendency of people with limited competence to lack the knowledge necessary to recognise their own incompetence.

The most popular posts on WordPress often appear to be those containing the least substantive thought.

It is probably getting dangerous to be clever, particularly in a world where independent thought, intellectual curiosity, and the unfortunate habit of noticing contradictions are increasingly treated as social liabilities rather than useful human capaciti…

There is a peculiar contradiction at the heart of doctoral study.

America did not become the world’s most powerful country through military strength and economic wealth alone.

A country can possess the technology required to defend itself and still depend upon somebody else’s cooperation to use it.

Harmonic structure is the relational organisation of differences through which interacting processes establish, sustain and transform distinguishable patterns across space and time.

Capitalism is not, in itself, the problem.

Being uniquely well informed carries a peculiar social burden: you are recruited for the pub quiz, consulted on the affairs of the world, and quietly expected to leave everyone’s favourite conclusions exactly where you found them.

How Our Systems of Symbolic Wealth and Success Are Making Planetary Civilisation Catastrophically Fragile What follows is a little more complicated than it first appears.

It is a fragile thing, this having of ideas, and more fragile still their expression.

Ignaz Semmelweis (1818–1865) was a Hungarian physician working at Vienna General Hospital when, in 1847, he identified a disturbing difference in maternal mortality between two maternity wards.

We have developed the peculiar habit of treating extreme wealth as evidence of extraordinary human worth.

One of the stranger things about watching global communication is discovering how remarkably similar everybody is in their determination to be different.

We need technology.

What is happening in France is interesting beyond the particular grievances involved.

When things go wrong, we usually look for the thing that went wrong.

What if the communication system is producing the politics we keep blaming on individuals?

Politics does not simply use mass communication.

When service delivery is governed by commercial expansion, the person requiring assistance becomes the means by which the system sustains itself.

Writing seriously with generative language models produces a peculiar ritual.

John, known as “the Savage”, is a character in Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World.

It starts slowly.

There is a faulty assumption buried beneath much of the excitement about autonomous warfare.

Much of what we now spend enormous effort protecting exists because the systems around us require it to exist.

A world already strained by ecological disruption, technological acceleration and political antagonism has little capacity to spare for conflict manufactured as a business advantage.

A civilisation can become exceptionally good at doing something it remains profoundly foolish to continue doing.

A system can persist while its parts, states and circumstances change.

I write as a neutral observer, from a philosopher’s perspective.

The answer to an “or” question is yes whenever at least one of its alternatives is true.

The end of the world now comes with a keynote address.

Our vocabulary is being subjected to remedial education by machines.

Holism and Climate Change Climate change is usually presented as a problem of magnitude.

I went out for some exercise today and somebody shouted abuse at me from a passing car.