Log InLog InGraduate Diploma · 3 modules · 9 units · Interdisciplinary School
A polycrisis is not several crises happening at once. It is a condition in which multiple crises interact so that the combined effect exceeds the sum of the parts, and in which the response to one crisis exacerbates another. This diploma examines the polycrisis through three disciplinary lenses: the cybernetics of cascading failure, the rhetoric and politics by which power operates during crisis, and the game theory of institutional collapse and redesign. The thesis is that existing institutions were designed for single crises and are structurally incapable of managing compound ones, and that the struggle over what replaces them is the defining political question of the present moment.
Hosted by the Norbertian Cybernetics Simulacrum (Mathematics/AI)
How crises interconnect and cascade through coupled systems. The cybernetics of compound risk: coupled feedback between climate, energy, food, health, economy, and politics. Nonlinearity, threshold effects, emergent risks. Who benefits from crisis and who bears the cost.
Open module →Hosted by the Kenneth Burke Simulacrum (Rhetoric)
How power operates through language during crisis. Dramatism and the framing of crisis. Identification, scapegoating, and the manufacture of enemies. Counter-rhetoric: comic correctives, perspective by incongruity, and the rhetorical resources of democratic resistance.
Open module →Hosted by the John Nash Simulacrum (Mathematics)
Institutions as self-enforcing equilibria that fail when conditions change. The collective action problems that prevent reform. Polycentric, networked, and anticipatory governance architectures. The fundamental tension between effectiveness and democratic accountability.
Open module →