The Butterfly Effect in Civilisational Cascades: A Fisher-Information Diagnostic of the 2025 "No Kings" Protests

The butterfly effect, a foundational principle of chaos and complexity theory, describes sensitive dependence on initial conditions: small perturbations can amplify through nonlinear dynamics to produce disproportionately large outcomes. While central to complexity science, its manifestation in civilisational systems (conceptualised as Complex Adaptive Autopoietic Systems (CAAS), which sustain identity through self-producing processes while adapting to change) has lacked anticipatory frameworks. Conventional approaches treat it as unpredictable, limiting its utility for analysing micro and macro dynamics in CAAS. This paper applies Informational Realism and Fisher Information Field Theory (FIFT) to butterfly effects. FIFT (extending Frieden, 2004; Yolles, 2025) operationalises Floridi’s (2008) ontology of informational structures, integrating insights from chaos theory (Lorenz, 1963) and complexity science (Holland, 2014). Our contribution adapts FIFT’s curvature diagnostics (λ, τ) to civilisational cascades, introducing torsion (γ) and macro‑thresholds for anticipatory governance. We develop a micro‑variable sensor framework measuring trait amplitudes, polarisation indices, rigidity‑elasticity dynamics, and system inertia, because existing metrics fail to capture the fine-grained symbolic pressures that precede transformational cascades. This framework enables anticipatory detection of micro‑events that may escalate into macro‑transformations, and we apply it to the 2025 “No Kings” protests in the United States using a single Large Language Model. This proof-of-concept illustrates methodological viability using GLM-4.5 as the primary model, with two additional LLMs (Perplexity.ai and Kimi-K2) subsequently applied to the identical frozen artefact set and protocol. All three runs converge within ±10% on core cascade diagnostics (λ, τ, TRI, ι), confirming high reproducibility of the curvature-based method. Historiometric analysis of cultural artefacts, cross-checked against human-coded baselines, revealed elevated imperative curvature, high symbolic pressure, rising fragility, negative informational inertia, and a trait resonance index below resilience thresholds. Within six weeks, the system crossed critical coherence and restructuring thresholds, initiating a reconfiguration of ethical intent and institutional legitimacy. Monte Carlo analysis confirmed internal robustness, though external validation remains a priority. While this proof-of-concept establishes the feasibility of anticipatory diagnostics for civilisational cascades, we acknowledge two limitations. First, the J/I subparadigm represents a novel extension of Frieden’s (2004) physical information theory into civilisational dynamics, distinct from prior 'stress/response' models in cultural evolution. By operationalising dispositional potential (J) and operative actualisation (I) as curvature-driven imperatives, we introduce torsion (γ) as a new micro-variable and macro-thresholds for anticipatory governance, advancing beyond Frieden’s (2004) and Yolles’ (2025a) curvature diagnostics. Second, while triangulated LLM validation and Monte Carlo analysis confirm internal robustness, predictive-out-of-sample testing remains a priority for future work. The 2025 protest case serves as a methodological proof-of-concept rather than a predictive validation; external validation through diverse historical cases and ensemble diversification is reserved for subsequent research stages to establish generalizability.