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Vol. X · No. IV
Notes from the practice.
§ Blog

Blog

Writing from Dynamical Systems Group on modeling, verifying, validating, and governing the systems that people depend on.

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September 22, 2025

Meltdown

Generative AI has split the atom of content production, and the chain reaction has begun. What we need now is regulative AI: the feedback systems that keep a chain reaction from becoming a meltdown.

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March 19, 2024

Engineering Legitimacy

A set of heuristics decomposing legitimacy into three distinct trade-off curves, to help people negotiate the tensions within participatory governance.

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January 9, 2024

Knowledge Networks and the Politics of Protocols

Building tools that let users provision, operate, maintain, and govern their own instances of an application is one of the most politically potent acts in open-source software development.

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November 13, 2023

Objects as Reference: First Principles of Digital Organization

A theory of objects as reference, offering first principles for understanding and building new forms of digital organization and cyberinfrastructure.

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October 16, 2023

On the Role of Models in Governance, Economics, and Technology

Dynamical Systems Group’s work centers on developing models of complex systems that help decision-makers throughout the engineering life cycle.

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October 10, 2023

Method for Functional Decomposition of Organizations and Their Environments

A method for decomposing an organization into the functions that answer the regulatory forces in its environment, building on Lessig’s Pathetic Dot Theory.

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September 1, 2023

A Language for Knowledge Networks

Digital infrastructure that supports conversations between organizations can enable small specialized firms to outcompete large institutions.

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August 8, 2023

Inside the Very Human Origin of the Term “Artificial Intelligence” — And Its Seven-Decade Boom/Bust Cycle

Amber Case on the 1955 coining of the term “artificial intelligence” at Dartmouth, framed less as a scientific breakthrough than as an act of academic distancing from Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics.

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August 3, 2023

Managing Complexity with Model-Based Systems Engineering

Model-based systems engineering uses mathematical and computational models to keep complex systems safe, effective, and sustainable across their full life cycle.

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July 31, 2023

An Algorithm Is a Camera

Bazin believed the camera gave us the world itself, and the same faith now attaches to algorithms. Both produce representations, and no representation is a view from nowhere.

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June 14, 2023

The Animating Purpose of Dynamical Systems Group

How Dynamical Systems Group understands its own animating purpose: its mission, its values, and the ways they interact.

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April 6, 2023

What Constitutes a Constitution?

A written constitution is one implementation of the constitutive function; code, protocols, and social norms fulfill it too, and most organizations already have some of each.

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February 2, 2023

Disambiguating Autonomy

Autonomy, disambiguated: two categories (political and functional), four types (individual, collective, strategic, tactical), and the tensions and trade-offs between them.

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