Today, I didn't learn much...

Table of Contents

• 1. Update
• 2. Authors Excavated

1. Update

Today, I updated my website. I had to merge a couple of PRs and update Eleventy from v2 to v3. Because of the version change, several things broke. If not for Kiro + Opus 4.6, it would have taken me much longer to resolve the errors as I am a Javascript and Node.js noob. Also, I added a like button to my notes just to gauge engagement. It is completely anonymous; so feel free to like it if you found anything I had to write interesting/valuable/helpful. As I keep writing more, I will keep evolving my website. It is fun to work on this...

2. Authors Excavated

These are some authors (and their works) I came across while reading a book recently that I thought were interesting and want to follow up on their work later:

1. David Trotter: Paranoid Modernism (2001)
2. Bernard Harcourt: Against Prediction (2007) and Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age (2015)
3. Josef Ansorge: Identify and Sort: How Digital Power Changed World Politics (2016)
4. Pierre Rosanvallon: The New Social Question: Rethinking the Welfare State (2000) and The Populist Century (2021)
5. Ivan Ascher: Portfolio Society: On the Capitalist Mode of Prediction (2016)
6. Robin Blackburn: Banking on Death (2002) and Age Shock (2006)
7. Ilya Prigogine: Order Out of Chaos (1984), The End of Certainty (1997), and From Being to Becoming: Time and Complexity in the Physical Sciences (1980).
8. Shona Brown and Kathleen Eisenhardt: Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos (1998)
9. Tom Baker and Jonathan Simon: Embracing Risk: The Changing Culture of Insurance and Responsibility (2002)

My interest in them is because of my notes on 2026-02-08 and 2026-02-09, and my leading question is: How do systems — political, economic, natural — manage or exploit unpredictability?

Based on Opus 4.6, this is the thread that joins these authors:

• Prigogine shows that order emerges from chaos in physical systems.
• Brown & Eisenhardt apply that same logic to corporate strategy.
• Baker & Simon & Ascher show how risk and prediction have become the dominant logic of capitalism and governance.
• Harcourt & Ansorge reveal how states use classification, surveillance, and actuarial tools to sort and control populations.
• Blackburn demonstrates how financial instruments (credit, pensions) have always been mechanisms of power disguised as neutral market operations.
• Rosanvallon traces how democratic institutions struggle to contain the uncertainty inherent in collective self-governance.

It is highly unlikely that I will get to read all of these authors and their works; I am most interested in Prigogine, Harcourt, and Ansorge for now.