Monthly Archives: August 2025

Gartner’s 2025 Hype Cycle for Enterprise Architecture: A Critical Review

Gartner’s 2025 Hype Cycle for Enterprise Architecture catalogues trends and buzzwords but fails to grapple with core challenges. It overstates AI as the answer to everything, recycles old concepts under new names, and sidesteps long-standing fundamentals like bi-modal IT, plumbing vs business enablement, and the EA reputation problem. A better hype cycle would cut the noise, confront EA’s accountability gap, and ground guidance in practical playbooks, cost discipline, and measurable business outcomes.

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Therapist Fight Club: Carl Rogers’ Person-Centred Psychology for the Neurodiverse Mind

This article reinterprets Carl Rogers’ person-centred psychology through the lens of Asperger’s and systems thinking. Stripping away sentimental language, it presents Rogers’ model as a structured feedback loop, a “Therapist Fight Club” where both therapist and client co-train, honing coherence and self-consistency. Written as an interest piece for the neurodiverse, it reframes therapy not as emotional fixing, but as optimising a system to run with fewer contradictions.

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From Policy to Procurement: How Standards Bodies Influence UK Cyber Buying Cycles

It’s not just what’s secure, it’s what’s accepted, assured, and approved. Here’s how standards quietly determine what gets bought in cybersecurity. In cybersecurity, buying decisions are rarely made on features alone. Especially in the UK public sector and regulated industries, procurement is often shaped by frameworks, certifications, and official guidance issued (or heavily influenced) by standards bodies. These organisations, from NCSC and NIST to IASME, ISO, and CIISec, may not sell products, but they define the guardrails within which procurement happens. They help determine what “good” looks like, what qualifies as “secure enough,” and what’s required to win a bid. This article breaks down how standards bodies and frameworks influence what UK organisations actually buy, adopt, and fund when it comes to cybersecurity.

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The Shadow Ecosystem: Alumni Networks, Closed Groups, and Whisper Influence in Cyber

Beyond public policy and LinkedIn posts lies a quiet web of influence, trusted groups, off-book referrals, and unseen signals that shape who gets funded, hired, or heard in UK cybersecurity. Cybersecurity in the UK has a formal face: policy frameworks, standards bodies, public panels, and professional networks. But beneath that, there exists a shadow ecosystem, informal, invitation-only, and often more influential than any official organisation. This is where reputations are made (or unmade), where partnerships are brokered before anyone sees a press release, and where quiet nods matter more than job titles. This article explores the informal infrastructure of UK cyber influence, the alumni groups, private chat channels, Slack collectives, and backchannel referrals that quietly shape decisions in hiring, procurement, investment, and policy.

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What CISOs Really Read: Reports, Forums, and Signals That Shape Decisions

Forget the vendor hype. Here’s what makes it to the top table when security leaders plan, buy, and act. Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) are drowning in noise. Every week brings new whitepapers, vendor webinars, analyst reports, and threat briefings, but only a handful cut through and shape decisions at the enterprise level. So, what do CISOs trust? What do they read, bookmark, cite, and share internally when building strategy or justifying spend? This article examines the forums, publications, briefings, and individuals that significantly influence CISO thinking in the UK, beyond vendor brochures.

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Brothers Against the Day: Dostoevsky, Derrida, Pynchon and Baudrillard at the End of the Sign

This article weaves together the philosophical contours of Derridean deconstruction, Baudrillardian hyperreality, and semiotic theory to interrogate the literary universes of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Thomas Pynchon. A Semiotic Descent into Hyperreality, Paranoia, and the Collapse of Meaning

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The Quiet Power Players of UK Cybersecurity: Who Really Shapes the Agenda?

Behind the acronyms and front-facing roles lies a network of advisors, committees, and convenors quietly setting the pace for cyber strategy in Britain. When we talk about power in UK cybersecurity, we often mention the big institutions… NCSC, DSIT, UK Cyber Security Council, or heavyweight companies like BT, BAE Systems, and Microsoft. But step closer and a more nuanced picture emerges: one shaped less by job titles and more by trust, networks, and proximity to policy formation. This article explores the real power players… not always in the spotlight, but instrumental in influencing policy, procurement, public guidance, and funding flows. These are the advisors, secondments, committee members, and convenors who quietly shape the UK’s cyber agenda.

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Entropy and the Implosion of Meaning: Pynchon in the Age of Baudrillard’s Hyperreality

This essay explores the work of Thomas Pynchon through the critical apparatus of Jean Baudrillard, with particular focus on the concepts of simulation, hyperreality, and the implosion of the real. Rather than offering a totalising reading, this essay stages a dialogue between two elusive figures, Pynchon, the postmodern novelist of paranoia and systems, and Baudrillard, the post-Marxist theorist of simulacra and the symbolic collapse of the real.

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