Here’s how hope dies: first as a promise and then as a compliance report. A reformer gets elected to fix a nation’s broken system. Vox populi vox dei and all that. Change you can believe in! Once “in power,” the reformer discovers the throne is mostly theatre. The new team’s earnest efforts drown in bureaucracy – endless task groups and committees, piling plans and proposals, all eager to help, yet nothing moves. The old state machine grinds on, indifferent. An invisible windowpane somehow stops positive change from happening, as if a shadowy system existed beyond and beneath the visible levers of power. The result? Not reform, but more of the same – only heavier, slower, worse. We promised less of x and more of y; we delivered x+2=y. You know the story. Many such cases.
After a while, if you’re of the noticer persuasion, you start noticing this fascinating paradox repeating itself, and you start wondering. Is there some system you’re missing in all of this? Some complex machine hidden deep in the edifice of government. Suppose you assume this obscure, shadowy system is somewhere there, blocking reform. Where do you begin looking for it? The default route is to ask the experts. They will surely know. But, you say, the experts live in an echo chamber of faulty assumptions, longstanding biases, and manipulated data. Science denier, are you anon?
Alternatively, you could work from first principles. The deductive option is to disassemble the obscure system into its components and figure out their functionality and role in the larger whole. As much as you’d like deconstructing things, it would not do, as you don’t have access to the obscure system apart from your observation and pattern recognition skills. Induction, then. You can infer the system’s purpose and general functionality from observing its impacts. Watch the shadows it casts, the ripples in reality.
Sometimes, this would be enough. But, as we discussed in The Naked King Spell, the purpose of a system is what it does. Therefore, if a system seeks to hide, it must first hide its true actions – its purpose leaks through them. In other words, what if this system wears a mask? Determining what a system is actually doing can often be challenging, particularly if it obfuscates its operations to appear as something else entirely. The system might purposely generate synthetic shadows to convince you these are not the droids you seek. Again, many such cases.
You can overcome this problem by focusing on the other end of the equation and examining how the system feeds itself, that is, on its energy source. A system’s energy source determines its internal structure and interactions with the external environment. Obscuring actions is relatively easy – muddy the waters and the trail vanishes. Hiding the energy source is more complicated because it must, by definition, exist outside the system, leaving a trace as it interfaces with the system’s logistics.
For example, if you’re observing a system that gets its energy from livestock – say, cattle – that system will likely have organized itself for optimal control over the pastoral lifecycle. It cannot be otherwise because cattle is that system’s most precious resource. You can then safely deduce you’re dealing with a pastoral nomad society with all the cultural, economic, and political implications that follow.
Similarly, a system that gets its energy from agriculture will organize and act differently from a system feeding itself on industrial production. An agricultural society’s most precious resource is land, and it would, therefore, organize the entirety of its cultural, economic, and political protocols around control over the lifecycle of land. Not so for an industrial society, which has to organize itself around the capitalization, production, distribution and consumption of assembly line output at scale.
Alternatively, suppose the primary energy source of a system comes from government subsidies or government agency contracts. In that case, that system will structure itself to control and maximize energy input from the government acting as its energy source. Now consider a mafia network fed by racketeering and drugs. This system will optimize itself to control territorial monopolies and manipulate fear and loyalty among its operators and victims. Its routines will revolve around securing supply chains, silencing threats, and evading law enforcement – every action aligned with sustaining its energy source.
A system’s source of energy reveals its structure and goals. Cattle? You’ve got nomadic Männerbünde. Land? Farmers and feudalism. Factories? Assembly line labor, capital accumulation, and consumerism. State subsidies? Extension of parasitic bureaucracy. Racketeering and drugs? Mafia.
You don’t need to trace how the system spends all its energy; you only need to understand its energy source. A system’s energy source reveals its objectives and operational methods, what it wants to control, and what it has to affect in its environment. Therefore, identifying a system’s primary energy source allows you to determine the vector along which it aims to control its environment. This, in turn, will allow you to understand what the system actually does.
Energy defines purpose. Purpose defines control. Control defines action.
Power
In simple systems – a warband, for instance – power is acclamation. An Achilles, Agamemnon, or Odysseus rises as chief. His power is a function of the warband’s will, performed continuously by its actions. Imagine the warband as a network of actors whose agency is necessary for generating and performing that power. Various technologies are also part of the network performing it. When the warband tames horses or invents the chariot – as an anon Sintashta warband once did – they dramatically extend the scale of its raids. The warband now extracts tribute from a vast area, and the chieftain’s wealth grows; people now say that his power has grown to extend over the vast tribute area.
In systems, power is not force. Confusing the two is a common mistake. Force is the applied effect of power, not its cause. Take the warband chief: his power isn’t in breaking skulls but in the band acting as though his word breaks skulls. Imagine the anon Sintashta band that invented chariots. Its chief’s power wasn’t in the chariots and their speed – these are just the vectors along which his power is applied as a force. His power is in the raiders, blacksmiths, horses, and chariots aligned as a network applying force against the farmers who must pay tribute. And yes, as long as the farmers pay their tribute, they also perform the network of power.
The chief’s power has always been an afterglow of the warband’s (the network’s) dynamic performance of a specific set of routines across the scale of the network’s surface. The more intricate, complex, and synchronized these routines, the more pervasive and stable the power seems. When the warband stops performing it, the chief loses his power. A new chief is elected and now sits in his place. What happened to the old chief’s power? It seemed so vast and impressive when he wielded it. How did it disappear? These are the wrong questions to ask, as the power never resided with a specific chief in the first place.
Power is a network phenomenon – an effect of the warband’s routines, maneuvers, and alignment. To understand the power, you must understand the dynamics of the network that generates it. From the network’s perspective, what we perceive as power is a function of a series of maneuvers and mundane routines enacted by the network’s actors. The phenomenon we call power is the effect of that consistent and ongoing performance, not its cause. Yet, we commonly attribute to it causal properties. When the warband network is aligned perfectly, we say its chief has power. One can even observe how that power is wielded, generating the impression of causality. The chief issues an order, and it is executed. Someone, somewhere, experiences the force of the chief’s power and has to either resist or yield to it.
The warband may grow to tens of thousands of warriors, making us marvel at the power of its chieftain. Perhaps now he is dressed in royal garments, wields a scepter, and wears a crown. Surely, the crown and scepter are where the power resides. After all, when the chieftain dies, we put the crown on the new chief; long live the chief!
But then, drop this “powerful” chief into enemy territory with his crown and scepter. What is he now? A victim in funny clothes. Like Delaroche’s painting of Napoleon at St. Helena, the ruler of Europe reduced to a sad man in an out-of-place uniform, forlorn on an ocean rock. How confusing when the mighty fall. Wasn’t he powerful?
Paul Delaroche, Napoleon at St Helena, 1855 (fragment)
The confusion is in the causative flow of agency – the chief never had power; rather, power had him. It seems counterintuitive that the seemingly causative source of power is, in fact, the effect of a long chain of relations that have to be continuously aligned, upheld, and performed. Power is the effect of that long network chain performing it, not the cause.
As an aside, this is why oppressive states love atomized individuals and fear and suppress independent networks – the latter can exercise power, while the former cannot. Contrary to appearances, individualism is a totalitarian state’s favorite ideology for the masses. Yes, anon, be all you can be, but don’t think about organizing a sovereign männerbund,church, commune, labor union, religion, or militia. Those are all bad for you. Your extended family and clan are bad for you as well – they oppress you, you see. Be yourself, be free! So much freedom is to be had when you abandon all these tools of oppression! Anyways.
The network-generated power principle scales in complex systems. The modern state operates no differently with its labyrinth of systems and routines. Here, too, power flows from the network of bureaucrats, filing protocols, intranet switches, three-letter agencies, drab brutalist buildings, and countless alignment subroutines. These actors perform state power, weaving it from mundane interactions and alignments. Networks within networks, actors upon actors, an ephemeral field guiding the visible hand. Do you understand the reformer’s confusion?
In a warband, the power-generating network is pretty clear – warriors, raids, tribute, feasts, long live the chief. Simple. But scale it up, and clarity dissolves. In large systems, scale adds efficiency and complexity up to a point, after which the system has to choose whether to retain adaptability or keep scaling up with efficiency. State bureaucracies rely on a government’s budget – seemingly bottomless until it isn’t – and always opt for the least efficient mode of complexity, which diffuses and abstracts the power-generating network. A warband’s chain of actions is short – kill, take, divide, repeat. The modern state’s chain is labyrinthine, stretched across countless systems, actors, and subroutines. Each piece performs a fragment of the whole, and no single actor sees the entire picture.
From the reformer’s perspective, sitting at the “command center” of the system, its subroutine chains are so abstracted and obfuscated as to appear self-perpetuating. The reformer seems to rule, appoint people at all key departments, sign things, and issue executive orders but is, in fact, a function of the very machine they are supposed to reform. The reformer’s power is a function of the network they aim to dismantle – a contradiction from the start. In turn, the network has no interest in its undoing and resists the reformer at every step. It absorbs, redirects, and stalls, ensuring that reform dies before it begins. Sounds familiar?
The Art of Hiding Pebbles
People imagine the deep state as an omniscient shadow bureaucracy – unelected, unsupervised, corrupt, all-seeing, and surgically competent. The esoteric alphabet agency from a Jason Bourne film. This shadowy, all-powerful enemy is a beloved trope of all serious conspiracy theories. We’re resisting a 5000-year-old death cult anon, the final red pill! This is such a comforting story – it helps order the chaos and noise of reality into a neat victim narrative with heroic individualist overtones. There’s nothing you can do, but now you’re one of the few who know about these things.
However, there is nothing deep about a bureaucrat. Have you not seen one? Bureaucracies are neither deep nor competent; they are inertia-bound self-reproducing machines focused on their own expansion while growing less and less efficient over time. Like a tapeworm. Left unchecked, a bureaucracy invariably drags down the system it is supposed to serve into a Red Queen Trap.
When communism fell in Eastern Europe, the formal state structures of the entire oppressive apparatus remained. The following day, department names were changed, seals were swapped, and red stars were painted over. The bureaucrats were still there, yet their power was gone. Why? Again, because power doesn’t live in people, titles, desks, or badges. It lives in network alignment – the chains of routines, actors, and energy flows that generate it. Once that alignment fractures, yesterday’s power structure becomes a row of imposing brutalist buildings housing sex shops, with its top operatives peddling hair loss treatments in late-night infomercials.
There is no deep state; there is deep power.
Chesterton once noted that a wise man hides his pebbles on the beach, among countless others. Deep power follows the same principle. There is no deep state; there are networks performing their routines while concealing their actions and, to the extent that they can, their energy sources. Where would you hide a network of profound influence? In plain sight, among a thousand mundane ones. Within the complex edifice of the modern state, these networks are like a pebble hidden on a pebble beach.
Take the tax office – everyone’s favorite bureaucracy. On the surface, it shuffles papers and collects revenue. Beneath that, its routines generate energy to feed a broader network – the state. Now imagine another vastly smaller network, hidden across tax offices, forestry departments, alphabet agencies, universities, corporations, and opposition parties while skimming off their revenue energy feed. Its survival depends on appearing as unremarkable as a beach pebble. It thrives because it blends in.
Obfuscation is not just a simple tactic; it is the network’s primary survival mechanism. Networks that generate deep power obfuscate their actions and hide their energy sources in complexity, bureaucracy, or layers of plausible deniability. Depending on their environment, they can be expected to dedicate resources to generating the synthetic shadows I mentioned earlier. These shadows are designed not just to mislead but to exhaust your ability to discern reality.
How did Nabokov put it?
“A shadow of a waxwing slain / by the false azure in the windowpane.”
Another benefit of synthetic shadow-casting is that when deep networks apply force, the source of that force is always obscure: an unknown perpetrator, a synthetic terror group, or a lone gunman. Sad! If you understand this, you see why the reformer’s attacks against the visible structure of the state rarely achieve meaningful results. The visible structure is camouflage for the networks generating deep power. Deep power networks are the reformer’s primary target. However, striking the networks is only possible after identifying their energy source and disrupting the flows that sustain it. Even then, the reformer must focus on disrupting the networks’ routines and alignment.
And so, the reformer swings at shadows. If they’re smart, they quickly realize it’s easier – and safer – that way. The deep power network hides dispersed behind innocent office doors, audit reports, and coffee-stained memos, with closely aligned force just an arm away. Lean too close, and you’ll feel the false azure’s breath on your neck. So many such cases.
So, how do you fight a deep power network? Usually, you don’t because you’re not part of a network generating enough power. But, if you have the network to back you up, there are two primary ways of dealing with it. The Stalin way: clear almost every pebble from the beach and seed it with new pebbles. That way, no matter how well camouflaged and distributed the deep power network is, enough of its nodes get misaligned to disrupt it. Alternatively, the FDR way: build another, much larger pebble beach and route all energy flows to it. That way, the deep power network’s energy sources, routines, and alignment are disrupted at once by the alignment of a much more extensive network.
Both options are very costly. The first leads to direct network confrontation, weakening the system or tearing it apart. The second buries the system under new burdens, leaving it no options but to seek new energy in expansion. Rome tried both. Sulla put in place the first, buying the system a generation of peace followed by two more civil wars. Octavian put in place the second, condemning the system to expand in search of new energy until it could not – and collapsed irreversibly. In the end, no matter the method, a new pebble joins the beach, and the game begins anew.
It pays to be well-prepared for the occasional wardrobe subversion (Diffusion XL).
The setting
All human systems – be it corporations, restaurants, spy agencies, or nail salons – compete for scarce resources. Apart from competing with each other, they all face the Sisyphean task of continuously staving off entropy. They all lose in the end, though some have quite a bit of fun along the way.
When a system, be it a sushi bar or an entire country, tries to isolate itself from the external world, it may stave off competitors for a while. Think North Best Korea behind a very high wall. Unfortunately, isolation only speeds up entropy. Imagine a teenager’s bedroom as a system isolated from the outside world and no longer receiving external input (like parental cleaning services). Over time, clothes accumulate on the floor, empty snack wrappers create a new carpet layer, and mysterious new life forms evolve in the pile of discarded pizza boxes in the corner.
This isolated ecosystem rapidly accelerates towards chaos – an increase in entropy. The room becomes a miniature universe obeying the second law of thermodynamics: in an isolated system, entropy tends to increase, leading to disorder. It is better to remain at least somewhat open to the outside world and have at it before the inevitable. But that’s another story.
This story is about those systems opting to remain at least somewhat open in the competition for scarce resources. In this high-stakes game, direct confrontation is only sometimes the wisest path to victory. There are better, more refined ways of defeating an opposing system.
In this piece, I propose that the most subversive yet elegant method to triumph over a competing system is to make it detouritself into a state of inertia. Moreover, this self-detour can be induced as if casting a spell.
I call it the naked king spell.
Before going further, let’s quickly outline what inertia is and why it is bad for you. In brief, inertia is a system’s stubborn repetition of a routine until failure. A system is in a state of inertia when it continuously performs a set of operations regardless of external conditions. Consider a restaurant that clings to the menu that initially made it successful. Why, the restaurant owner may believe the menu exemplifies the ideal Platonic food form, worth three Michelin stars. It doesn’t matter.
Clinging to a set of actions regardless of circumstances is how inertia sets in. The state of inertia usually continues until a non-negotiable change in external conditions forces a system breakdown. Change, by its very nature, has infinite forms. Tastes evolve, and the once-popular Michelin menu is now passe; the restaurant faces a crisis.
Why a crisis, though? Can’t they adapt? After all, it would only take a change in the menu to adjust to external changes in taste. Here lies the beauty of the spell – self-adaptation doesn’t even come into play. The restaurant cannot adapt and must face a crisisbecause it cannot simply change its menu – inertia, remember? Once set in inertia, it is tremendously difficult for a system to alter its path on its own. Inducing this process is like casting a spell, convincing a system to bind itself to a set of its own routines.
The elegance of the naked king spell is that in casting it, you’re exploiting a system’s internal structure and operations, effectively trapping it in its internal procedures. Let’s explore how the spell works, the effects of inertia, and, in the process, figure out how to defend against it.
The naked king
To understand the inertia spell, you must know Hans Christian Andersen’s famous story, usually translated in English as The Emperor’s New Clothes. Here’s the short version.
An emperor, or king, was fond of new clothes and always searching for new fashions to surprise his subjects. The king, you see, liked shocking the bourgeoisie before it was popular. It was his thing. Some kings are fond of new wars, others of old mistresses, but our king had a penchant for deconstructing bespoke Savile Row shirts and Herringbone jackets.
One day, the king was approached by a pair of clever swindlers who told him they could weave completely new fabrics, so fine and delicate that only those of sophisticated tastes and deep wisdom could see them. The art of deconstructed fashion brought to its logical conclusion, as it were.
The clothes made of this fabric would be invisible to everyone else, who, presumably, lacked the required learning and sophistication. The final solution to prole aesthetics! The king paid the two con men the large sum of money they demanded, and in return, they pretended to weave the fine clothes they promised. But, of course, they just wove thin air.
After a few days, the king and all his ministers inspected the magnificent new clothes. Of course, such sophisticated literati as them had long ago learned the fine art of pretending to see that which is not there, and so they all admired the magnificent new clothes. After all, only a lowly prole would fail to see their splendorous refinement.
In a stroke of genius, the king even organized a procession through his capital’s streets to show his subjects the fine new clothes he wore. As an artist, he was also fond of raising social awareness through art for the masses. The people lined the streets to see the spectacle, and all exclaimed how unique and beautiful the king’s new clothes were. None wanted to appear uncouth or stupid, or worse, be accused of hate speech towards the alternatively clothed. They were wise to the ways of modern political science, you see.
Only a little boy exclaimed loudly, “But the king is naked!”
The way Andersen tells the story, the boy’s innocent observation of reality breaks the spell, and everyone starts laughing at the king and his imaginary clothes. Speaking truth to power works!
Of course, you know better than this, dear reader. So, let’s dive in and discover the workings of the naked king spell and what it brings.
The spell
On the surface, the scenario boils down to the dangers of denying the obvious. The king and his court made fools of themselves – mainstream media’s favorite topic. The story cautions us against trusting those who promise the impossible and points to the value of good old common sense.
On a deeper level, the story illustrates a breakdown of the feedback loops within a system. In a healthy system, an initial observation of external conditions is followed by decisions, actions, and consequences, which feed into new observations, decisions, and actions in a continuous loop. Not so in our scenario.
In the real-world enactment of the story, the boy would shout, “The king is naked,” but instead of the people opening their eyes to the obvious, the boy and his parents are usually whisked away by a three-letter agency, never to be heard from again. Who knows, maybe they are accused of hate speech? The king identifies as clothed! Perhaps they are branded as lunatics, conspiracy theorists, enemies of the state, foreign agents, science deniers, or all of the above.
The boy’s reaction represents the long-delayed feedback loop between the king’s court and reality. In a healthy system, that feedback loop works continuously across all areas where the system interfaces with the external world. In other words, if the kingdom were a healthy system, the king’s adventures in the realm of new clothes would immediately end with a courtier pointing out the obvious. If that fails, the courtiers would simply install a new king. Many such cases!
What matters is that a system set in inertia cannot afford to entertain signals challenging its direction. Any such signal amplified enough would break the closed circuit of inertia. In an inertia-bound system, the boy’s ‘the king is naked’ feedback signal endangers internal procedures and must be silenced.
That feedback loop is the key element we must isolate to understand the spell. In our example, the king is a system’s linchpin. He and his ministers form the center of power, that is to say, the center of coordination and control in the network we call the state.
The spell is cast when the con men convince the king that only educated and sophisticated people would see his fine new clothes. People who see him as naked are framed as uncouth simpletons. Crucially, everyone can see that the king is naked, including himself, but all persist in the charade. It doesn’t matter whether they know the actual state of the king’s body and the kingdom as a system. What matters is that they project an alternate reality about that state.
Those closest to the king, and therefore with the most power and the most to lose, may even convince themselves that the king is indeed wearing the fine clothes promised by the swindlers. Comprehensively deluded citizens might do the same. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that the power center in this system is projecting an alternate reality to itself, in complete contrast with the actual state of the system.
The essence of the naked king spell is this subtle shift from a reality image generated by active feedback loops to an image based on the self-projection of a synthetic reality. Once the shift is complete, the system does the rest of the onerous work of marching toward collapse on its own. The synthetic reality projected by the system’s command center overrides every aspect of the system.
After all, the purpose of a system is what it does.
A system under the naked king spell starts acting according to the synthetic reality it projects to itself instead of the external conditions it interfaces with. Again, casting the spell involves convincing a system’s power center to supplant its healthy reality image with a synthetic one. There are various ways to achieve this, but ideally, the synthetic image must involve valorizing a procedure or protocol internal to the system.
That is because a system is highly likely to identify with its internal protocols. The corporate culture-building gospels contain endless variations of the “we do things this way, and this is who we are” mantra. Tying the synthetic reality image generated by the spell caster to an existing protocol in the target system will map the synthetic reality to the system’s self-identity. If done well, the target system sees the synthetic reality as a core element of its identity and is highly likely to defend it.
In our story, the con men use the king’s love for new clothes as the internal system protocol to exploit. The exploit works by valorizing the synthetic reality of non-existent ‘new clothes’ as the epitome of the existing protocol of refined clothing, itself a core element of the system’s identity. The system’s power center now maps the synthetic reality to its core identity of fashionable refinement. The spell was successful.
In the restaurant example, an attacker could use the restaurant’s obsession with its Michelin rating as the exploit vector and bind the spell to the menu or food presentation. Again, the attacker aims to spellbind the target system into creating a synthetic image of reality and attach it to its existing protocols. This tricks the target system into mapping the synthetic reality onto how it perceives itself. After all, a system’s purpose is what it does.
Crucially, exploiting an internal protocol when casting the spell also ensures that the system’s defense mechanism, whether three-letter agencies or HR departments, will actively defend the spell and its synthetic reality. Anyone within the system pointing out that the king is naked will be identified by its defense mechanism as a threat to the system’s operations and suppressed. This is how the feedback loop with reality breaks down and detouring into inertia begins.
What does this breakdown process look like? First, the parts of the system still performing a feedback loop with external conditions start signaling the growing disconnect between external reality and the synthetic one generated by the spell. For example, in a war scenario, low-level officers inform their commanders that the current tactics do not work and casualties are rising catastrophically. Alternatively, in an academic scenario, teaching staff advise their faculty deans of persistent student dissatisfaction with the curriculum.
We already know that a healthy system interprets these signals as important feedback and closes the loop by adjusting its actions accordingly. However, a system under the naked king spell views these signals as dangerous challenges to internal operations and aims to stamp them out. Usually, such a system ignores feedback loops entirely. If that is not possible, it will use various methods to silence them – from denial to force. For example, the commanding officer tells the lower ranks he will not tolerate any questioning of his orders, or the teaching staff is forced to resign for pushback against institutional culture.
Generally, inertia-bound systems would react in one of the following ways to ‘the king is naked’ corrective feedback loops:
Ignore them entirely. This is the default reaction.
Counter-messaging and denial: The king is not naked! Saying otherwise is bigoted hate speech. The boy is lying, uninformed, deluded, a foreign agent, or a denier of the science of fine cloth making.
Derailment and diffusion: The king has always been naked, and here’s why that’s good for you!
Well poisoning: The king is indeed naked, but that is because he is secretly a reptilian! Also, the earth is flat.
Force: Shut up or else! The threat is then followed by direct silencing.
In complex systems under the naked king spell, options one to four are usually in play, with force reserved for situations where the other tactics fail. For example, a government would engage in extensive denial, derailment, and well poisoning before it escalates to direct force against internal opposition. However, in simpler systems, the hijacked defense mechanism usually escalates from ignoring feedback directly to force. For example, a corporation’s HR department would fire anyone repeatedly questioning the synthetic reality projected by the spell.
Eventually, a system under the naked king spell reaches a stage where two destructive forces start working on it simultaneously. First, such systems are subject to high entropy due to operating in a synthetic reality. Disorder builds up internally, simply by nature of the discrepancy between external reality and the synthetic image of reality under which the system operates. In effect, such systems have effectively isolated themselves from the world and experience all the wonders of the second law of thermodynamics I mentioned.
Systems experiencing this effect of the spell try to mitigate the build-up of entropy by artificially increasing internal order through bureaucratic procedures. They would multiply administrative steps, invent new busy work, and create more procedural oversight positions while escalating penalties for non-compliance. The problem is that additional procedures only create the illusion of order while actually increasing the internal costs of operating the system, eventually triggering the Red Queen Trap.
The second destructive force is generated by the elements of the system itself. Think of a system as a network continuously performed in existence by a set number of nodes, which are the network’s actors. To simplify, think of the king, his court, and his subjects as the actors of such a network. As the system limps along the path of inertia, those of its actors interfacing with external reality find themselves under a constant cognitive strain generated by the discrepancy between the synthetic reality and actual external conditions.
The command center of a system is usually shielded from reality by one or multiple layers of intermediary actors reporting some approximate version of that reality to the center. These frontline actors suffer the most from the effects of the cognitive strain, as they can observe in real-time the widening gap between the synthetic image of reality maintained by the system and the actual external conditions.
Think of this cognitive load as an additional energy cost for the system, as the frontline actors must omit the discrepancy from their reporting. Why? If they don’t, they immediately trigger the ‘king is naked’ chain and its consequences. Those who persist in trying to report the discrepancy are removed from the system by its defense mechanisms.
Eventually, first some and then most of these frontline actors stop believing entirely in the synthetic reality generated by the system. “If they lie about the king wearing clothes, they probably lie about everything else too.” Such actors become extremely dangerous to the system’s internal cohesion at that point, as their dissociation adds, you guessed it, additional energy costs to the system. In effect, the whole network starts disintegrating from within along its internal connections in a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop.
In that sense, the naked king spell is a feedback dissociation exploit leading to inertia.
Let’s reassess. The naked king spell exploits a system’s internal protocols to dissociate it from its feedback loops with external reality. Casting the spell involves binding a synthetic reality to a system’s internal protocols, thereby making the artificial reality part of a system’s identity. The art of casting the spell is in correctly selecting and valorizing a procedure or protocol internal to the target system. When done correctly, the spell convinces the target system that the synthetic reality is a critical element of the system’s identity.
A system under the naked king spell will use its defense mechanisms to target and eliminate network nodes questioning the synthetic reality. In doing that, the system maintains the spell’s effects using its own energy resources, further weakening itself in the process. In fact, the naked king spell generates increasingly destructive forces within the system, mirrored by equally rising energy costs as the system tries to resist the rising disorder.
Again, the synthetic image generated by the spell forces the system to operate in effective isolation from external conditions, leading to rising internal entropy. To stem the rising entropy, the system adds additional internal procedures and reporting steps, further increasing its energy costs.
Meanwhile, frontline actors in the network experience rising cognitive strain as they are caught in the middle between the system’s synthetic reality and external conditions. Eventually, such actors experience complete dissociation from the system’s artificial reality and start disintegrating the network from within in a positive feedback loop.
The naked king spell causes an inertia-bound death spiral in the target system. The spell’s subtle subversive beauty is that the target system performs the entire death spiral using its internal energy and resources. This is the art of inertia casting.
Inertia as a curse, inertia as an art
The signs
An inertia-bound system is permeated by the ethos of doing things by the book. It is dogmatic, intolerant of all positive feedback loops even when obviously beneficial, and automatically considers innovation as deviation. Inertia-bound systems develop complex internal protocols describing the procedural steps for digesting external conditions in accordance with the synthetic reality image.
These protocols are seen as optimizing the routine functioning of the system and come with an internal bureaucracy enforcing them, further increasing energy costs. They also generate a growing pool of sycophants convinced following the protocols – parasitizing on the system’s energy – is good for them. Following these new rules has helped my career! That is why systems under the naked king spell multiply committees, review panels, and working groups. They also usually have hypertrophied human resource departments to enforce the performance of this synthetic reality.
Furthermore, inertia-bound systems are usually optimized for synthetic external conditions at a point of time x, with beautiful protocols describing all possible procedures for that scenario. The problem is that external reality is in flux, and the point of time is now invariably x+n. Whenever external conditions consistently change, they pose new problems for an inertia-bound system.
Given a change in its environment, a system has to either expand energy towards altering its internal protocols and evolving or try to brute force the new problems with its existing protocols. An inertia-bound system invariably chooses to brute force new problems instead of adapting and changing because of the cost of altering its synthetic reality image.
Consequently, such a system traps itself in a spiral of increasing conversion inefficiencies. In other words, the system requires more and more energy to perform its existing set of tasks as the discrepancy between the outside and the internal synthetic reality continuously widens.
An inertia-bound system has clear-cut deterministic responses to environmental unpredictability, choosing to bottle up or disregard unfamiliar influences. Unpredictable scenarios threaten the synthetic reality image and must be avoided at all costs. This fear of uncontrollable scenarios with no playbook to follow cancels potential evolutionary paths and further buries the system in the swamp of inertia.
In other words, we know all these new and strange things are happening outside, but we will ignore them and talk about these other familiar things because they don’t threaten our synthetic model of reality. Ironically, this dynamic makes an inertia-bound system appear very resilient and robust. Nothing will make us change our values!
Of course, this outward robustness is the side effect of the recursive protocols maintaining the synthetic reality image. The seemingly bulletproof nature of the system is a mark of its fragility. Its adherence to set patterns only piles up an inertia-resultant backlog of problems, inhibiting any potential resolution or innovation. Inertia, dressed up as stability, is the force driving the collapse and disintegration of the system.
The art
As I mentioned in the beginning, I consider the naked king spell the most elegant way of defeating an opposing system. You, dear reader, should have a relatively clear idea as to why by now. That being said, paradoxically, most systems would gladly settle into inertia – if only reality would let them. After all, it is so much easier to do the same thing repeatedly or not do anything at all. It is much cheaper, too, until entropy shows its face.
For such systems, the naked king spell is pure seduction. Finally, we have implemented robust procedures and eliminated the reckless innovators who threatened our safe space! However, there are a number of other reasons why the art of inertia casting is elegant and subversive.
Efficiency: this is the most economical and efficient system attack mode, as an inertia-bound system spends energy on defeating itself. As described above, casting the spell renders the target system’s energy into a weapon against itself, paradoxically aiding in its own collapse. Moreover, the system’s defenses actively suppress its remaining healthy elements from lifting the spell. Opting for a subtle exploit rather than overt confrontation also reduces the potential for conflict and resistance.
Predictability: the spell is highly predictable, as the actions of an inertia-bound system can be mapped with a high degree of accuracy the longer it stays in inertia. All one needs is knowledge of the protocols valorized in creating the synthetic reality image, and the target system usually doesn’t hide them – they are now part of its identity. The naked king will want to show his new clothes at every opportunity.
Control: an inertia-bound system is easy to control from the outside, as changing external conditions can easily affect its energy costs. The invisible influence of the spell is subtle and can continue unabated, allowing sustained manipulation of even seemingly well-defended systems. This subtle control also eliminates the likelihood of attack detection or retaliation, undermining the system’s operational capabilities.
Preservation: casting the spell preserves the system’s structure for potential redirection or repurposing. After all, the essence of inertia is resistance to change. The spell caster can expect the target system’s internal structures to remain largely intact and ready for a strategic realignment or conservation. Preserving systemic integrity also allows the spell caster to steer the target system toward desired outcomes with greater control and precision.
Universality: the spell is universally applicable because inertia is universally present. Moreover, inertia is seductive. Most systems usually want to be in a state of inertia – it feels safer, cheaper, more robust, and more stable. This universality also gives the spell caster many options for managing the aftermath of the target system’s unraveling – from preserving the system’s resources to their redeployment.
Smooth reboot: the spell allows for smooth transitions from collapse to restoration of the inertia-bound system, thanks to its intact structures. If the spell caster chooses to reboot the system in a new configuration, the transition occurs without needing a complete rebuild. This quality of the spell also gives the system a semblance of continuity, ensuring that its revival is as efficient as its suspension was deliberate. The king is dead; long live the king!
There is a related point worth explaining further. If left on its own, an inertia-bound system will eventually grind to a halt and collapse under the dual forces of growing internal entropy and rising energy costs. This collapse might have a broad spectrum of forms, but the underlying support structure of the system will usually remain intact. For example, our Michelin restaurant closed down, but the restaurant’s premises, kitchen equipment, etc., are still intact and available for reuse.
As another example, a country set in inertia might run itself into the ground, but valuable infrastructure such as ports, powerplants, and factories would likely remain intact and available to the spell caster. There are many examples of this dynamic unfolding in recent history once you start looking for them. This preservation is crucial to the smooth reboot process. When a system collapses under inertia, its support architecture remains dormant yet ready for revival.
In other words, if the spell caster decides to reboot, the system doesn’t have to be reconstructed from the ground up. Instead, the existing structures can be revived and, if necessary, reconfigured to meet new objectives or adapt to new circumstances. For example, the new owner of our formerly Michelin restaurant retains the name and appearance but has altered the menu. Alternatively, the new corporate management of a tech company changes the company name, fires 85% of staff while retaining the infrastructure, and steers the company in an alternative direction. True story.
Alright, you say, but how can a system defend against the naked king spell? Before we examine defenses against the spell, I have to repeat that inertia is seductive. Left on their own, absent a malicious spell caster, systems are likely to detour themselves into inertia eventually. It is the easy path. It is consistently tempting for a system to multiply its internal procedures, increase the actors in its network, and reify its internal protocols into dogma. After all, it feels good to grow, be more orderly, and have a coherent culture that resists change. Conversely, it takes tremendous discipline and ideological drive for a system’s command center to resist these temptations consistently.
Defending against the naked king spell
There are three defense modes against the spell – structural, cultural, and aesthetic. Each mode consists of a set of strategies protecting the system from the naked king spell and the seductive pull of inertia. They work best when deployed simultaneously in a layered active defense strategic posture.
Structural defense
The structural mode of defense focuses on the system’s internal architecture – that is, its processes, hierarchies, and frameworks. Structurally hardening a system against the spell involves reformatting its internal architecture around flexibility and rapid adaptation. Ideally, every internal architectural element – be it a protocol, local hierarchy, or action framework – should be optimized for rapid reconfiguration in response to external changes or internal challenges.
In practice, this means that protocols, hierarchies, and frameworks are construed as ad hoc and subject to dynamic alteration at a local level. In simpler terms, you should not need three months and the approval of multiple committees to adapt existing procedures to an external change – your adaptation should be immediate and executed locally.
Architecturally, this involves reconfiguring the network for a decentralized decision-making process to enhance responsiveness and ensure short and fast feedback loops. Importantly, decentralized decision-making doesn’t mean the absence of hierarchies. It means delegating decision-making power from the center to the nodes closest to the direct feedback loop with external conditions.
In practice, the somewhat heretical military command doctrine of mission-based orders (auftragstaktik) captures this form of organization very well: my orders to you allow you to modify or suspend my orders in overcoming obstacles and achieving my intent. In other words, if I intend to achieve goal x, you can alter all my protocols, hierarchies, and action frameworks to achieve that goal. A system with functioning decentralized decision-making adapts very fast but, even more importantly, has built-in control center redundancies, making the detour into inertia that much harder to accomplish.
A system structurally hardened against inertia would appear highly flexible and organizationally flat, with decentralized decision-making and modular architecture that can be easily updated or replaced. An attacker would find it hard to exploit an internal protocol when the target system construes all protocols as ad hoc and subject to dynamic alteration by local decision-making nodes acting in a persistent auftragstaktik. It is much more difficult for inertia to take hold when the system is always in a state of anticipatory readiness for change.
Cultural defense
The cultural defense mode focuses on the values, beliefs, and behaviors permeating the system. Culturally hardening a system against inertia involves propagating experimentation, risk-taking, personal responsibility, change anticipation, and rapid adaptation as core systemic values. Encouraging these values as system-forming precludes the complacency-driven drift into seductive inertia and ensures the system would maintain its dynamic interface with changing external conditions.
In other words, the network’s actors, permeated by this culture, can be expected to actively search for ‘the king is naked’ feedback opportunities, quickly close the loop, and continue the cycle. The ‘agile’ principles, subject to so much contemporary corporate infatuation, are a good approximation of these cultural values. However, many systems try to deploy agile principles while maintaining internal structures that are antithetical to these values, ending with agile lip service.
Consider the practice of penetration testing in cybersecurity, when deployed at scale, as a good analogy for the cultural defense mode in practice. Following the analogy, a system deploying this defense mode assumes that it has, and always will have, many potential inertia vulnerabilities that a malicious spell caster can exploit. Therefore, the system’s core belief is that every actor in the system’s network is responsible for continuously anticipating, searching for, and adapting to such exploits. Crucially, actors are rewarded with vulnerability bounties and promoted in the hierarchy for discovering situations where ‘the king is naked.’
In practice, a system permeated by these values is also likely to have deployed a version of auftragstaktik, making it very hard to attack with the naked king spell. Such a system would elevate the active seeking of fast feedback loops into a core priority, maintaining its vitality and flexibility. A systemic culture that celebrates adaptability and views rapid change as a golden opportunity rather than a severe threat is inherently more resistant to the naked king spell and the seductive call of inertia.
Aesthetic defense
The aesthetic defense mode focuses on a system’s outward appearance and its interfaces with external conditions. It relates to the way the system appears to outside actors and the information frame it communicates to them. A system aesthetically hardened against the naked king spell continuously evolves its framing, communication strategies, and the symbolic brand it projects to the outside world. This makes it much harder for a malicious spell caster to isolate a static element of the system’s identity to which a synthetic reality can be bound.
The continuous aesthetic evolution of a system’s external framing also signals adaptability and flux, externally and internally, reinforcing its defenses against inertia. This constant renewal of the system’s interface with external conditions also helps to prevent the internal stagnation that the spell seeks to exploit, particularly when matched with the cultural and structural defense modes.
On a deeper level, a system deploying the aesthetic defense mode has inevitably weaponized its external framing. It uses its external communications channels to partially or wholly obfuscate its internal condition, camouflage its core protocols, and misrepresent its operational culture.
This brings me to an interesting subset of the aesthetic defense mode – a strategy I call the naked king gambit. Briefly, a system can mimic being in an inertia state as a defense from malicious spell casters. Such a system would adopt the outward aesthetics of an inertia-bound system as a camouflage. The outward sign is the same; how do you know if it reveals a reality or simulates it?
In other words, clever courtiers can install a naked king on the throne while running the country behind the scenes. From the outside, the kingdom would appear deeply stuck in inertia, with a naked king seemingly in control. The king might appear to be demented, shallow, or completely insane. It doesn’t matter. Internally, system structure and operational culture might look and behave entirely differently.
In combination, these defense modes create a layered and dynamic defensive posture against the naked king spell and the seductive onset of inertia. Structural flexibility ensures the system can dynamically pivot in response to external changes, cultural vitality keeps the system’s operations adaptable and anticipatory, and aesthetic dynamism weaponizes the system’s external signals, preventing stagnation. Together, they form a comprehensive defense strategy that protects against inertia and propels the defending system toward continuous renewal.
In the grand cacophony of competing systems, casting the naked king spell is often the most sublime form of subversion. It is not a battering ram at the gates but a whisper that turns the system against itself. Defending against this spell requires rethinking the structure, culture, and aesthetics of a system in an ongoing battle of wits, wills, and wardrobes.
So, the next time you face the signs of systemic inertia, remember: the naked king was seduced into dropping his clothes. Don’t let your system suffer the same fate. Anticipate and welcome change, stay adaptive, and maybe keep a fashionable spell caster on speed dial. After all, in the world of systems, it pays to be well-prepared for the occasional wardrobe subversion.
Every system is in its essence a network of actors that perform it from moment to moment into existence. The participants in the system, or actors in the network, enact and perform it through their daily routine operations.
Some of these routine operations are beneficial to the system being performed, and some are not. Some add to the energy of the system and therefore reduce entropy, while others take away from that energy and increase entropy. If the former outweigh the latter, we can say the system is net positive in its energy balance because it generates more energy than it wastes. If the latter outweigh the former, we can say the system is net negative in its energy balance as it wastes more energy than it generates. How to distinguish between the two in practice?
The rule of thumb is that any action that increases complexity in a system is long term entropic for that system. In other words, it increases disorder and the energy costs needed to maintain the internal coherence of the system and is therefore irrational from the system’s perspective. For example, this includes all actions and system routines that increase friction within the system, such as adding steps needed to complete a task, adding reporting paperwork, adding bureaucratic levels a message must go through, etc. Every operation a piece of information needs to go through in order to travel between the periphery, where contact with external reality happens, and the center, where decision making occurs, comes at an energy cost and generates friction. Over time and at scale these stack up and increase entropy within the system.
Needless to say, the more hierarchical and centralized an organization is, the more entropy it generates internally.
In addition, what appears as a rational action at a certain level is irrational from the perspective of the system as a whole. For example, if a layer of management increases paperwork this is a perfectly rational action for that management layer, because it makes it more needed and important within the system’s internal information flow; however, this is a totally irrational action from the point of view of the system because it increases its internal operational costs.
Put differently, from the point of view of a system such as a large hierarchical organization or a corporation, the only actions of the agents comprising it that can be considered rational are the ones that increase the net positive energy balance of the system – i.e. reduce internal friction and/or increase external energy intake.
Importantly, this should be viewed across a time axis.
For example, when it comes to a complex operation such as a merger between two departments, or two companies, it might be a good idea to compare the before and after energy net balance for the two systems and the new system that has emerged as a result of their merger. It is also important to look in high enough granularity in order to understand the specifics of each network within the system, and its operations in time.
Say you had two admin structures servicing two different departments, and, now that the departments have merged, senior management optimizes the two admin structures into one, and cuts 50% of the stuff due to ‘overlapping roles’. On the face of it this is logical and should reduce internal energy drag, as admin structures are net negative – they don’t bring in new energy and have no contact with external reality.
However, the new merged admin structure now must service a twice larger part of the system than before, and as a result ends up delegating 30% of that new work back to the front line staff it is nominally servicing. As a result, the front line staff now have to perform 30% more reporting paperwork, which is net energy negative, and that much less time to bring in new energy into the system. In effect, the long-term effects of this ‘optimization’ are net energy negative and result in increased friction within the entire system that was supposed to be ‘optimized’.
I had an interesting conversation about my essay on the Red Queen Trap with someone on LinkedIn, and it made me think about something I did not explain in the essay.
In an ideal environment each element of a system will be acting rationally and striving towards its own preservation and, by extension, the preservation of the system. Rational action here can be understood as the action resulting in optimal energy efficiency from a given number of viable options, where optimal energy efficiency is a function of the energy that must be spent on the action vs the energy that is gained from performing the action. The scenario I describe in the Red Queen Trap essay is set in such an ideal environment.
However, in the real world individual network actors do not often act rationally towards their own or the system’s preservation. This is not necessarily out of stupidity or malice but is often due to limited information – what Clausewitz called ‘the fog of war’ – or a host of other potential motivations which appear irrational from the perspective of the system’s survival. What is more, the closer an actor is to the system’s decision-making centers, the higher the impact of their irrational decisions on the overall state of the system. The irrational decisions of front-line staff [the periphery] are of an entirely different magnitude to the irrational decisions of senior management [the decision-making center].
In practice this means that in complex hierarchical systems decision-making centers will have much higher entropy than the periphery. In other words, they will be dissipating a lot of energy on internal battles over irrational decisions, in effect actively sabotaging the internal cohesion of the system. As a reminder, the lower the internal cohesion of a system, the more energy the system must spend on performing itself into existence. The higher entropy of decision-making centers may be harder to observe in the normal course of operations but becomes immediately visible during special cases such as organizational mergers or other types of system-wide restructuring.
Interestingly, it is in such special cases when senior management is often tempted to make the internal environment of the system even more competitive – through the layering of KPIs or other means – in order to ‘optimize the system’ and protect its own position in the hierarchy. While on the face of it this appears to be a rational decision, it invariably ends up lowering internal cohesion even further, thereby increasing energy costs and routing even more resources away from the periphery and contact with reality [market competition].
The Red Queen Trap is to be found in the famous Red Queen paradox from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. In this story, a sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice climbs into a mirror and enters a world in which everything is reversed. There, she encounters the Red Queen who explains to her the rules of the world resembling a game of chess. Among other things, the Red Queen tells Alice:
It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.
On the face of it, this is an absurd paradox, but it reveals an important insight about a critical point in the life of every system. Let me explain.
Every system, be that a single entity or a large organization must perform itself into existence from moment to moment. If it stops doing that it succumbs to entropy and falls apart. Spoiler alert, in the long run, entropy always wins.
To perform itself into existence every system must expend a certain amount of energy, which is a function of the relationship between its internal state and the external conditions it operates in. In other words, it must expend some energy on keeping its internals working smoothly together, and then expand some energy on resisting and adapting to adverse external conditions.
The better adapted a system’s internal state is to its external conditions, the less energy it must dedicate to perform itself into existence, and the larger the potential energy surplus it can use to grow, expand, or replicate itself.
However, external reality is complicated [not to be confused with complex] and changes dynamically in ways that cannot be modeled over the long term and require constant adjustments by the systems [organisms, humans, organizations] operating within it. In other words, an external state observable at time A is no longer present at time B.
This is a problem for all systems because it requires them to change how they operate.
It is a small problem for simple systems which are usually internally homogeneous and highly distributed. Their homogeneity means they don’t need to spend much energy to maintain their internal state, and their distributed topology means they make decisions and react very fast.
It is a serious problem for complex systems [large organizations] which are usually rather centralized and heterogeneous. Their heterogeneity means they must expend a lot of energy to maintain a coherent internal state consisting of various qualitatively different elements, and their centralized topology means they react and make decisions rather slow.
It is a profound problem for complex hierarchical systems [large organizations with vertically integrated decision making] which consist of multiple heterogeneous elements stacked along one or more vertical axes. Vertical integration means that each successive layer going up is further removed from direct exposure to external conditions and is, therefore, slower in adjusting to them.
A system might be quite successful in adjusting its internal state to external conditions at time A, but a later time B might present a different configuration of conditions to which the internal state of the system at time A is profoundly inadequate. The more complex the system, the more energy it must expend in adjusting to changes in external conditions from time A to time B.
Complex hierarchical systems have the hardest time in making these adjustments because key strategic elements of their internal state [i.e. decision-making centers high in the hierarchy] are far removed from direct contact with external conditions. To orient themselves and perform the system’s OODA loop they rely on communication about external conditions reaching them from the periphery of the system, while orders on necessary adjustments must travel the other way, from center to periphery. This takes time, and the more layers the signal communicated from the periphery must pass through on its way to the center the more abstracted it becomes from external conditions. In other words, the center receives a highly imperfect version of the external conditions about which it must make adaptive decisions.
Over time, this generates a growing number of errors in the internal state of the system, requiring more and more energy to be routed to internal maintenance [i.e. bureaucratic paperwork], leaving less and less surplus energy for adaptation, growth, and expansion. Eventually, and this stage can arrive very fast, the system reaches a state of pseudo-equilibrium in which all energy it can produce goes towards internal maintenance and there is zero surplus energy left. This is where the Red Queen Trap kicks in:
The system does all the running it can do, to keep in the same place.
How does the trap work? First, from the inside everything in the system still seems to be operating smoothly and things are humming along following external conditions at present time A. However, this is a false perception of equilibrium, because when external conditions invariably change in future time Bthe system will have no surplus energy reserves to adjust to the new conditions.
The more imperfect the version of external conditions reaching the center of decision-making, the more pronounced the system’s inertia in this state of pseudo-equilibrium, and the deeper it goes into the Red Queen Trap.
Second, having eventually discovered there are no more surplus energy reserves left, the system must now make a choice. In the absence of surplus energy and provided there is no energy transfer from the outside, it must somehow free up energy from within its internal state to adapt. The question is, which internal elements should be sacrificed to free up that energy? This is where the Red Queen Trap’s simple elegance is fully revealed.
Essentially, there are two options – a seductively easy one and an unthinkable one. The seductively easy option is to sacrifice the periphery, or elements of it, and preserve the decision-making center. It is an easy choice for the center to make because it naturally sees itself as the key element of the system and this choice allows it to remain intact. It is a seductive choice because the center suddenly finds itself with a flush of spare energy which it can use to maintain the pseudo-equilibrium and often even to grow itself at the cost of the periphery. Alas, the elegance of the trap is in the fact that the seductively easy option removes the center even further from external conditions; less periphery equals fewer opportunities to observe and react quickly to external reality, thereby further magnifying the initial conditions that brought the system to this state in the first place. By making that choice the center sinks further into the trap.
By contrast, the unthinkable option is to sacrifice the center and preserve the periphery, thereby flattening the internal structure of the system into a less hierarchical form. It is an unthinkable option for the center to make because, as pointed out above, it naturally sees itself as the key element of the system, and this choice forces it to sacrifice itself. It is also unthinkable because it involves a thorough rethinking of the internal structure of the system, which until that moment was organized entirely around vertically integrated decision making, with little to no autonomy in the periphery. The center must not only sacrifice some of itself but also reorganize the periphery in a way allowing it to perform those functions in place of the center. This would allow the system to free itself from the trap.
Most systems choose the seductively easy option and the Red Queen Trap eventually grinds them into oblivion. Those few systems that go for the unthinkable option escape the trap and, if they remain persistent in their application of the unthinkable, learn how to go different places with running to spare.
These are some loosely organized observations about the nature of network topologies in the wild.
In terms of both agency and information, all entities, be they singular [person], plural [clan/tribe/small company], or meta-plural [nation/empire/global corporation] are essentially stacks of various network topologies. To understand how the entities operate in space these topologies can be simplified to a set of basic characteristics. When networks are mapped and discussed, it is usually at this 2-dimensional level. However, in addition to operating in space, all entities have to perform themselves in time.
This performative aspect of networks is harder to grasp, as it involves a continuously looping process of encountering other networks and adapting to them. In the process of performative adaptation all networks experience dynamic changes to their topologies, which in turn challenge their internal coherence. This process is fractal, in that at any one moment there is a vast multiplicity of networks interacting with each other across the entire surface of their periphery [important qualification here – fully distributed networks are all periphery]. There are several important aspects to this process, which for simplicity’s sake can be reduced to an interaction of two networks and classified as follows:
1] the topology of the network we are observing [A];
2] the topology of network B, that A is in the process of encountering;
3] the nature of the encounter: positive [dynamic collaboration], negative [dynamic war], zero sum [dynamic equilibrium].
All encounters are dynamic, and can collapse into each other at any moment. All encounters are also expressed in terms of entropy – they increase or decrease it within the network. Centralized networks cannot manage entropy very well and are extremely fragile to it.
Positive encounters are self explanatory, in that they allow networks to operate in a quasi-symbiotic relationship strengthening each network. These encounters are dynamically negentropic for both networks, in that they enable both networks to increase coherence and reduce entropy.
Negative encounters can be offensive or defensive, whereby one or both [or multiple] networks attempt to undermine and/or disrupt the internal coherency of the other network/s. These encounters are by definition entropic for at least one of the networks involved [often for all], in that they dramatically increase entropy in at least one of the combatants. They can however be negentropic for some of the participants. For example, WW2 was arguably negentropic for the US and highly entropic for European states.
Zero sum encounters are interesting, in that they represent a dynamic cancelling out of networks. There is neither cooperation nor war, but a state of co-presence without an exchange of entropy in a dynamic time-space range. I believe this is a rare type of encounters, because the absence of entropy exchange can appear only if 1] there is no exchange of information or agency, or 2] the amount of agency/information exchanged is identical from both sides. Needless to say, this process cannot be easily stabilized over a long time period and either morphs into one of the other two states or the networks stop encountering each other.
Recently I have been trying to formulate my digital media teaching and learning philosophy as a systemic framework. This is a posteriori work because philosophies can be non-systemic, but systems are always based on a philosophy. I also don’t think a teaching/learning system can ever be complete, because entropy and change are the only givens [even in academy]. It has to be understood as dynamic, and therefore more along the lines of rules-of-thumb as opposed to prescriptive dogma.
None of the specific elements of the framework I use are critical to its success, and the only axiom is that the elements have to form a coherent system. By coherence, I understand a dynamic setting where 1] the elements of the system are integrated both horizontally and vertically [more on that below], and 2] the system is bigger than the sum of its parts. The second point needs further elaboration, as I have often found even highly educated people really struggle with non-linear systems. Briefly, linear progression is utterly predictable [x + 1 + 1…= x + n] and comfortable to build models in – i.e. if you increase x by 1, the new state of the system will be x +1. Nonlinear progression by contrast is utterly unpredictable and exhibits rapid deviations from whatever the fashionable mean is at the moment – i.e. x+1= y. Needless to say, one cannot model nonlinear systems over long periods of time, as the systems will inevitably deviate from the limited variables given in the model.
Axiom: all complex systems are nonlinear when exposed to time [even in academy].
The age of the moderns has configured us to think exceedingly in linear terms, while reality is and has always been regretfully non-linear [Nassim Taleb built a career pointing this out for fun and profit]. Unfortunately this mass delusion extends to education, where linear thinking rules across all disciplines. Every time you hear the “take these five exams and you will receive a certificate that you know stuff” mantra you are encountering a manifestation of magical linear thinking. Fortunately, learning does not follow a linear progression, and is in fact one of the most non-linear processes we are ever likely to encounter as a species.
Most importantly, learning has to be understood as paradigmatically opposed to knowing facts, because the former is non-linear and relies on dynamic encounters with reality, while the latter is linear and relies on static encounters with models of reality.
With that out of the way, let’s get to the framework I have developed so far. There are two fundamental philosophical pillars framing the assessment structure in the digital media and communication [DIGC] subjects I have been teaching at the University of Wollongong [UOW], both informed by constructivist pedagogic approaches to knowledge creation [the subjects I coordinate are BCM112, DIGC202, and DIGC302].
1] The first of those pillars is the notion of content creation for a publicly available portfolio, expressed through the content formats students are asked to produce in the DIGC major.
Rule of thumb: all content creation without exception has to be non-prescriptive, where students are given starting points and asked to develop learning trajectories on their own – i.e. ‘write a 500 word blog post on surveillance using the following problems as starting points, and make a meme illustrating your argument’.
Rule of thumb: all content has to be publicly available, in order to expose students to nonlinear feedback loops – i.e. ‘my video has 20 000 views in three days – why is this happening?’ [first year student, true story].
Rule of thumb: all content has to be produced in aggregate in order to leverage nonlinear time effects on learning – i.e. ‘I suddenly discovered I taught myself Adobe Premiere while editing my videos for this subject’ [second year student, true story].
The formats students produce include, but are not limited to, short WordPress essays and comments, annotated Twitter links, YouTube videos, SoundCloud podcasts, single image semantically-rich memetic messages on Imgur, dynamic semantically-rich memetic messages on Giphy, and large-scale free-form media-rich digital artefacts [more on those below].
Rule of thumb: design for simultaneous, dynamic content production of varying intensity, in order to multiply interface points with topic problematic – i.e. ‘this week you should write a blog post on distributed network topologies, make a video illustrating the argument, tweet three examples of distributed networks in the real world, and comment on three other student posts’.
2] The second pillar is expressed through the notion of horizontal and vertical integration of knowledge creation practices. This stands for a model of media production where the same assessments and platforms are used extensively across different subject areas at the same level and program of study [horizontal integration], as well as across levels and programs [vertical integration].
Rule of thumb: the higher the horizontal/vertical integration, the more content serendipity students are likely to encounter, and the more pronounced the effects of non-linearity on learning.
Crucially, and this point has to be strongly emphasized, the integration of assessments and content platforms both horizontally and vertically allows students to leverage content aggregatesand scale up in terms of their output [non-linearity, hello again]. In practice, this means that a student taking BCM112 [a core subject in the DIGC major] will use the same media platforms also in BCM110 [a core subject for all communication and media studies students], but also in JOUR102 [a core subject in the journalism degree] and MEDA101 [a core subject in media arts]. This horizontal integration across 100 level subjects allows students to rapidly build up sophisticated content portfolios and leverage content serendipity.
Rule of thumb: always try to design for content serendipity, where content of topical variety coexists on the same platform – i.e. a multitude of subjects with blogging assessments allowing the student to use the same WordPress blog. When serendipity is actively encouraged it transforms content platforms into so many idea colliders with potentially nonlinear learning results.
Adding the vertical integration allows students to reuse the same platforms in their 200 and 300 level subjects across the same major, and/or other majors and programs. Naturally, this results in highly scalable content outputs, the aggregation of extensively documented portfolios of media production, and most importantly, the rapid nonlinear accumulation of knowledge production techniques and practices.
On digital artefacts
A significant challenge across academy as a whole, and media studies as a discipline, is giving students the opportunity to work on projects with real-world implications and relevance, that is, projects with nonlinear outcomes aimed at real stakeholders, users, and audiences. The digital artefact [DA]assessment framework I developed along the lines of the model discussed above is a direct response to this challenge. The only limiting requirements for a DA are that 1] artefacts should be developed in public on the open internet, therefore leveraging non-linearity, collective intelligence and fast feedback loops, and 2] artefacts should have a clearly defined social utility for stakeholders and audiences outside the subject and program.
Rule of thumb: media project assessments should always be non-prescriptive in order to leverage non-linearity – i.e. ‘I thought I am fooling around with a drone, and now I have a start-up and have to learn how to talk to investors’ [second year student, true story].
Implementing the above rule of thumb means that you absolutely cannot structure and/or limit: 1] group numbers – in my subjects students can work with whoever they want, in whatever numbers and configurations, with people in and/or out of the subject, degree, university; 2] the project topic – my students are expected to define the DA topic on their own, the only limitations provided by the criteria for public availability, social utility, and the broad confines of the subject area – i.e. digital media; 3] the project duration – I expect my students to approach the DA as a project that can be completed within the subject, but that can also be extended throughout the duration of the degree and beyond.
Digital artefact development rule of thumb 1: Fail Early, Fail Often [FEFO]
#fefo is a developmental strategy originating in the open source community, and first formalized by Eric Raymond in The Cathedral and the Bazaar. FEFO looks simple, but is the embodiment of a fundamental insight about complex systems. If a complex system has to last in time while interfacing with nonlinear environments, its best bet is to distribute and normalize risk taking [a better word for decision making] across its network, while also accounting for the systemic effects of failure within the system [see Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile for an elaboration]. In the context of teaching and learning, FEFO asks creators to push towards the limits of their idea, experiment at those limits and inevitably fail, and then to immediately iterate through this very process again, and again. At the individual level the result of FEFO in practice is rapid error discovery and elimination, while at the systemic level it leads to a culture of rapid prototyping, experimentation, and ideation.
Digital artefact development rule of thumb 2: Fast, Inexpensive, Simple, Tiny [FIST]
#fist is a developmental strategy developed by Lt. Col. Dan Ward, Chief of Acquisition Innovation at USAF. It provides a rule-of-thumb framework for evaluating the potential and scope of projects, allowing creators to chart ideation trajectories within parameters geared for simplicity. In my subjects FIST projects have to be: 1] time-bound [fast], even if part of an ongoing process; 2] reusing existing easily accessible techniques [inexpensive], as opposed to relying on complex new developments; 3] constantly aiming away from fragility [simple], and towards structural simplicity; 4] small-scale with the potential to grow [tiny], as opposed to large-scale with the potential to crumble.
In the context of my teaching, starting with their first foray into the DIGC major in BCM112 students are asked to ideate, rapidly prototype, develop, produce, and iterate a DA along the criteria outlined above. Crucially, students are allowed and encouraged to have complete conceptual freedom in developing their DAs. Students can work alone or in a group, which can include students from different classes or outside stakeholders. Students can also leverage multiple subjects across levels of study to work on the same digital artefact [therefore scaling up horizontally and/or vertically]. For example, they can work on the same project while enrolled in DIGC202 and DIGC302, or while enrolled in DIGC202 and DIGC335. Most importantly, students are encouraged to continue working on their projects even after a subject has been completed, which potentially leads to projects lasting for the entirety of their degree, spanning 3 years and a multitude of subjects.
In an effort to further ground the digital artefact framework in real-world practices in digital media and communication, DA creators from BCM112, DIGC202, and DIGC302 have been encouraged to collaborate with and initiate various UOW media campaigns aimed at students and outside stakeholders. Such successful campaigns as Faces of UOW, UOW Student Life, and UOW Goes Global all started as digital artefacts in DIGC202 and DIGC302. In this way, student-created digital media content is leveraged by the University and by the students for their digital artefacts and media portfolios. To date, DIGC students have developed digital artefacts for UOW Marketing, URAC, UOW College, Wollongong City Council, and a range of businesses. A number of DAs have also evolved into viable businesses.
In line with the opening paragraph I will stop here, even though [precisely because] this is an incomplete snapshot of the framework I am working on.
