Categories
Philosophy

Platitudes

Platitudes are memes (in Dawkins’ original sense) and optimally self-propagate through minds, artefacts and other information-processing systems in direct proportionality to the extent that they provide mechanisms, not for individuation or narcissistic self-validation, but for the regeneration of the assumptions, the grammatical and logical rules, and the gestalt contexts from which they derive. We do […]

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Philosophy

Pathologies of Self-Control

Partial assertions of self-control are foundational in personality formation but where they find themselves amplified at scale into authoritarian pathologies we witness the birth of profoundly insecure, uncontrollable beasts upon and in which no truly happy life might ever be cultivated.

Categories
Philosophy

Stimulus Shenanigans and Structural Inequality

Stress-testing a socioeconomic system: enduring and intractable problems of structural inequality percolate to the surface at moments of extreme duress. The truth is, this system is not foundationally oriented towards supporting anyone other than those who least need it. The people who most need help when the crap hits the fan (as it most certainly […]

Categories
life

Christmas Eve, 2020

Christmas Eve: a lonely walk around my neighbourhood where I captured these glorious sunflowers basking in the last rays of one of those long slow Summer’s afternoons that seem to sidestep evening and slide straight into night. It’s been a spectacularly difficult year for everyone and while I can’t see this changing at scale in […]

Categories
Philosophy

Labyrinth

The truth is that the more you seek approval and self-validation through other people’s eyes, the less you will ever find it or, and at the very least, the less it will ever come to fill that expanding void within you. We are all born (as much as we ever become) broken in this way; […]

Categories
Philosophy

Quicksilver Spectres of Endless Introspection

Even while we all actively generate endless tides of digital self-representation (as images, data points, digital footprints, biometric and geolocation records, corporate and institutional identifiers or classifications) of self-identity we find ourselves simultaneously slipping away from reality, certainty and any notion of existential closure. This irreducible uncertainty and quicksilver spectre of endlessly self-inflected introspection as […]

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Philosophy

Necessary Alienation and Anxiety

Some days I feel so out of place, so different and separate from the world. It is a paradox, of course: the essential and irreducible dissonance of life is precisely that unwitting method by and through which the world as a whole most optimally self-propagates and obtains patterned, sustainable continuity or environmental tenure; to maintain […]

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Philosophy

The thing about cyber and conflict…

Insecurity is implicit to – and irreducible in – technology. There is absolutely no way to guarantee complete and permanent closure of *any* communications system because the indefinitely-extensible logical and material basis of accelerating technological innovation is simultaneously the proliferation of increased probabilities of vulnerability and critical incidents. While there is something of a booming […]

Categories
Philosophy

Love and other distant horizons…

It never ceases to haunt me that the only love I have ever been able to truly understand has been that in which all aspiration must forever fall short of its goal as though seeking to obtain some infinitely distant horizon that recedes further away with every self-directed step of instinct or reflex taken towards […]

Categories
Philosophy

Happiness is an Infinite Game

What is ambition, recognition? What do you desire? Will the things that make you happy now still make you happy in five, ten, fifteen years? We are of course here engaged in an infinite and open adversarial game, against an unknown and unseen opponent that is all of a reality – past, present and future […]

Categories
culture

Bonfire

I kept making the mistake of thinking that I was writing those few bursts of staccato articulation that fell from my brain and through my fingers like dry ash upon a dusty digital screen. The truth was always and already that I did not write these words anywhere near so much as they wrote me […]

Categories
Philosophy

Poetry

Poetry is, of course, the original form of a language, any language, and in the simple articulation of a spoken word approximates to that ancient world in which every sound and every meaning was imbued with magic and mystery or the miraculous unknowing of an infant’s innocent mind as humanity itself that sees and hears […]