Month: April 2025

Cybernetics and the Banality of Narcissism

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The unalloyed stupidity of reckless tariffing and threats by the Trump administration against trading partners and allies around the world is baffling and deeply concerning. Even when a serious economist admits that tariffs can play a role in helping onshore manufacturing, they also slam the uncertainty that Trump’s mercurial behavior imposes on the world economy. Then there is the childish lashing out at universities, law firms, and perceived enemies like the former director of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency who contradicted Trump in 2020 on election fraud. Next we have the cruelty of rapid and wrong deportations and visa revocations based on alleged allegiances; freedom is no longer guaranteed for visitors and guests in our country. And then there are the oxymoronic efforts at efficiency in governance that involve no efforts whatsoever to identify how exactly to make our government more efficient.

This is the banality of narcissism aided by incompetence.

But, mercifully, the counter-currents that are pushing the country away from an economic catastrophe demonstrate the self-correcting nature of complex systems. The term “cybernetics” comes from the Ancient Greek term for the steersman of a boat. It was used by the French polymath Ampère in a volume dedicated to the structure of human knowledge where it referred to the science of governance. Ah, the Age of Enlightenment, when some hoped that through careful thought ideas like economics, government, and international relations could be improved. If only David Ricardo were here today to discuss his theory of comparative advantage with America’s leadership. Governance was in mind when Norbert Wiener invented the theory of cybernetics as a mathematical approach to system control where feedback signals steer the system towards stable patterns of operation.… Read the rest

Against Superheroes: Z Collective Commentary, Section 1

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Author’s Note: This is the first chapter of my novel, Against Superheroes, in its original form. It was conceived as an analysis of a tract found in space by aliens. The goal was to write from an exotic analytical perspective that misinterprets and overanalyzes the contained story, but that also contains a story in itself about the possibility that the inner story is related to the aliens’ culture. Footnotes are in their original alien translations, per the directives of my studious overlords.

Section 1

Z3 begins with a fragment from Sinister’s earliest recollections of the initial transformation:

The fear began with the realization that my right arm was becoming unusually heavy. The weight of the bracelet had not changed dramatically, but it seemed that my arm was thickening and I feared I would lower my arm and the combined artifact would slip off, risking possible damage on the tile floor, and so I reflexively swung my left arm to stabilize my wrist. The blank, formless face of the figure was less tarnished than the rest and the dim bathroom light dancing across the visage gave it a strangely animated swirling quality. Soon the weight in my arm moved through my shoulders and into my neck. I staggered and dropped to my knees.

All Z collectives know this passage, but we disagree with Z2’s reading in Peregrinations of Mythic Specialness1 that the inclusion of the specific details concerning the type of light amongst the picturesque imagery in the passage is a deliberate effort on the part of later redactors to try to concretize a mythic passage. It is equally possible to simply conclude that the author was not concerned with the overall flow of the writing but instead intended to convey facts while capturing aspects of his internal state.… Read the rest