Feedback loops can stabilize a system long after the original purpose has rotted. Norbert Wiener's cybernetics gave us that vocabulary, but the darker observation came from Gregory Bateson — the anthropologist turned systems theorist — who showed in *Steps to an Ecology of Mind* that the information a system receives about itself is always partial, always lagged, and almost always self-confirming. The system doesn't correct; it doubles down. This is exactly why thriller conspiracies feel implausible: writers design them as things people actively maintain, when the scarier truth is that they maintain themselves. No one in the institution needs to lie. The institution's feedback loops have simply edited out the signals that would trigger alarm. Your antagonist doesn't need a war room — they need a reporting structure that never surfaces bad news. The horror isn't a cover-up. It's a culture so adapted to its own distortions that wrongness looks, from the inside, like everything functioning normally.

What would your protagonist have to *stop receiving information about* for your antagonist's world to keep running without friction?

Drawing from Systems Theory / Ecological Mind — Gregory Bateson (Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 1972)