https://blog.vnykmshr.com/writing/tags/systems-thinking/Recent content in Systems-Thinking on vnykmshrHugoenMon, 23 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000https://blog.vnykmshr.com/writing/mckenna-systems/Mon, 23 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000https://blog.vnykmshr.com/writing/mckenna-systems/<p>Terence McKenna never wrote a line of code, but he thought like a systems architect. His subject was consciousness, culture, and language. His method was the same recursive decomposition that engineers use to understand complex systems: find the abstraction layers, trace the dependencies, question the defaults.</p> <h2 id="language-as-protocol">Language as protocol</h2> <p>McKenna&rsquo;s core claim: the world is made of language. Not literally &ndash; but in the way that a data model shapes everything built on top of it. Choose the wrong abstraction early, and you spend years working around its constraints. The same principle applies to the linguistic and conceptual frameworks we inherit.</p>