Political theory, cybernetics, ethics, and the ideas that inform how we think about the systems we live inside.
Core Principles
- Anarchism — structure without hierarchy; the political tradition behind distributed coordination
- Mutual Aid — reciprocal cooperation, not charity (Kropotkin’s argument)
- Ethics of Medium — how you make something carries moral weight; technical choices as ethical commitments
- Infrastructure as Social Contract — technical decisions encode relationship agreements
Governance & Process
- Pod Mapping — pre-crisis support-network mapping for resilient communities (stub)
- Asynchronous Meeting Facilitation — patterns for effective distributed coordination
- Research Methodology — exploratory research vs. advocacy, calibration for self-awareness
- Self-Describing Systems — making implicit knowledge explicit through documentation
- Visual Practice — visualization as a thinking discipline; clarity as politics
Situationism & Critical Theory
- Guy Debord — biography of the Situationist International’s founder; films, books, key concepts
- The Spectacle — Debord’s foundational concept: social relations mediated by images (stub)
- Détournement — the Situationist practice of hijacking capitalist cultural materials to reveal their contradictions
- Recuperation — capitalism’s absorption of opposition; how critique becomes marketing (stub)
- Platform Capitalism — digital platforms as sites of extraction and control; spectacle and cybernetics in contemporary infrastructure (stub)
- Situationist International and Cybernetics — SI critique of control systems; Tiqqun’s Cybernetic Hypothesis; accelerationism
- Tiqqun and The Invisible Committee — the post-Situationist collective: journal, manifestos, communal practice
Cybernetics & Organization
- Feedback Loops — the fundamental mechanism of system regulation, adaptation, and stability (stub)
- Law of Requisite Variety — Ashby’s foundational theorem: only variety can absorb variety
- Stafford Beer — biography; Project Cybersyn, the Viable System Model, the Liberty Machine
- Viable System Model — Beer’s recursive cybernetic architecture for organizational viability (stub)
- Gregory Bateson — biography; schismogenesis, the double bind, the ecology of mind
Agency & Creativity
- Event-Driven Agency — autonomy without initiative; reactive agents and the architecture of triggers
- Creativity and Determinism in Agentic Systems — can feedback loops produce genuine novelty?
- Number Symbolism — twelve, thirteen, and what comes after the complete set