The Uncanny Valley is a well-known description of the problematic relationship we (all) have with realistic images and simulations or embodied approximations of human beings; most notably in regards to robots, androids and other technologically-mediated replicas. Might we also speak of an “uncanny valley” and cognitive dissonance as manifest in (or as) the cultural, organisational and technological systems we inhabit and through which we endlessly seek to reflexively define and validate ourselves? The entities and artefacts we make “in our own image” include the abstractions and patterns through which we understand and organise the world and ourselves.
There most certainly is a disconnect and discontinuity between the world we perceive and the world as we would choose it to be. In many ways, the key dissonance is an embodiment of a false attribution of epistemological closure and certainty regarding ourselves and the world.
This gap or necessary logical inconsistency and incompleteness itself becomes a self-propagating morass of neuroses and ideological or methodological narcissism. We find ourselves inhabiting and validating the organisational meat grinders of “best practice” and conventional wisdom, generating the turbulence and complexity to which those methodologies are themselves best-suited as solutions.
In seeking control and certainty, we become trapped in spirals of conceptual poverty, a visceral uncanny valley of cyborg is a symptom of a deeper existential malaise.
Daedelus Kite 