PETER AYOLOV

(Skinner–Chomsky Debate Series, 3 part) Abstract The history of Walden can be read as a sequence of increasingly radical attempts to escape what civilisation has made appear inevitable. Henry David Thoreau’s Walden asked what remained of human life when the individual withdrew from the unnecessary material and social complexity of nineteenth-century civilisation. A century later, B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two reversed the experiment: instead of escaping from an imperfect society, why not redesign the social environment itself? Walden 3.1 proposes a third experiment. What if one of civilisation’s most fundamental technologies—language—has itself become an environment from which humanity must partially withdraw? This article develops Ayolov’s hypothesis from The Miscommunication Trilogy and The Planned Obsolescence of Language that language should no longer be regarded as the timeless essence of Homo sapiens, but as a comparatively recent cultural technology acquired by an evolutionarily...

(Skinner–Chomsky Debate Series, 3 part) Abstract Tyranny is usually explained through the character of rulers, the failure of institutions, ideological extremism or the political submission of populations. This article proposes a different and deliberately speculative perspective: tyranny may also be studied as an evolving technology of coordination whose forms change with the scale and complexity of human society. Drawing upon Geoffrey West’s work on complexity and scaling, the article asks whether the transition from small communities to cities, states, empires and contemporary digital networks creates increasing pressures for systems capable of coordinating, predicting and regulating the behaviour of enormous populations. West does not propose a mathematical law of dictatorship, and no such established scaling law currently exists; rather, his demonstration that complex systems change qualitatively as they increase in size provides the conceptual basis for extending the question ...