Four Trees of Technological Progress. What Usually Goes Unseen.
Everyone knows the game Civilization. It has a technology tree — you research writing, mathematics unlocks, then astronomy, then navigation. Clean and logical. But the real technological tree is more complex. Behind every node of the visible tree hide three invisible trees. And without them the main tree simply cannot grow. Let us go through this with concrete examples.Tree 1 — The Main Tree of Technologies This is what everyone sees. A new idea or scientific discovery gives birth to a new te...
Four Trees of Technological Progress. What Usually Goes Unseen.
Everyone knows the game Civilization. It has a technology tree — you research writing, mathematics unlocks, then astronomy, then navigation. Clean and logical. But the real technological tree is more complex. Behind every node of the visible tree hide three invisible trees. And without them the main tree simply cannot grow. Let us go through this with concrete examples.Tree 1 — The Main Tree of Technologies This is what everyone sees. A new idea or scientific discovery gives birth to a new te...
From Icon to Post-Reality: The Evolution of Ontological Synchronisation
The history of how humans engage with reality is often described as a sequence of technologies, media, or interfaces. But a more precise perspective emerges if we focus not on carriers of information, but on mechanisms of ontological synchronisation — that is, the ways in which different subjects come to share an understanding of what counts as real, existent, and actionable. From this angle, media cease to be mere channels of transmission. They become mechanisms for coordinating reality itse...
From Icon to Post-Reality: The Evolution of Ontological Synchronisation
The history of how humans engage with reality is often described as a sequence of technologies, media, or interfaces. But a more precise perspective emerges if we focus not on carriers of information, but on mechanisms of ontological synchronisation — that is, the ways in which different subjects come to share an understanding of what counts as real, existent, and actionable. From this angle, media cease to be mere channels of transmission. They become mechanisms for coordinating reality itse...
On Perpendicularity
We cannot say which viewer's interpretation of a film is closest to the director's until the director publishes their own. This seems obvious. But if you pause and think about it, something uncomfortable lurks behind that obviousness. In the absence of the original, we evaluate interpretations anyway. We say: this one is more logical, that one is better supported by the text, a third is internally contradictory. We build a system of criteria — and it works. Interpretations arrange themselves ...
On Perpendicularity
We cannot say which viewer's interpretation of a film is closest to the director's until the director publishes their own. This seems obvious. But if you pause and think about it, something uncomfortable lurks behind that obviousness. In the absence of the original, we evaluate interpretations anyway. We say: this one is more logical, that one is better supported by the text, a third is internally contradictory. We build a system of criteria — and it works. Interpretations arrange themselves ...
ORDER, POWER, FLOW
An Analytical Framework for Understanding Closed Structures of Power — from the Middle Ages to the Post-Trust SocietyIntroduction: The Basic FormulaHistory is the competition of closed structures for control over increasingly abstract levels of reality. An order in the broad sense is not only a medieval knightly brotherhood. It is any closed structure possessing three characteristics: the reproduction of itself and its values across generations, control over a key resource flow, and its own l...
ORDER, POWER, FLOW
An Analytical Framework for Understanding Closed Structures of Power — from the Middle Ages to the Post-Trust SocietyIntroduction: The Basic FormulaHistory is the competition of closed structures for control over increasingly abstract levels of reality. An order in the broad sense is not only a medieval knightly brotherhood. It is any closed structure possessing three characteristics: the reproduction of itself and its values across generations, control over a key resource flow, and its own l...
Traces Without Artefacts
Abstract This essay examines whether an advanced form of collective intelligence could have existed on Earth long before the emergence of humans, and whether any evidence of such existence would be recoverable. Drawing on the Silurian Hypothesis (Frank & Schmidt, 2018), palaeontological evidence for coastal mudflat ecosystems, and the mechanics of glacial destruction, it argues that the absence of physical artefacts is not evidence of absence — but rather a predictable consequence of the type...
Traces Without Artefacts
Abstract This essay examines whether an advanced form of collective intelligence could have existed on Earth long before the emergence of humans, and whether any evidence of such existence would be recoverable. Drawing on the Silurian Hypothesis (Frank & Schmidt, 2018), palaeontological evidence for coastal mudflat ecosystems, and the mechanics of glacial destruction, it argues that the absence of physical artefacts is not evidence of absence — but rather a predictable consequence of the type...
