Are strawberries real? Well, for a start, they are not even berries and only retain the name by something of an etymological accident, linguistic coincidence or literary convention. More curiously, though, whenever we step onto the playing field of language we find ourselves asserting definitions, identities and assumptions of inviolable truth just as though there […]
Oh yes, language is a jungle forest of overgrown ferns and flowered mysteries that in these dark places of knowing unknowing nurtures just such unseen beasts and delicate orchids as these that worry our world; each and all fall upon us as living wonders and enduring fears that live through us as much as we […]
Just living is proving to be quite difficult, at times. I really miss being a child and not constantly feeling as though I have to second-guess everything both I and everyone else do or think and feel. There is a simple state of just existing, of simply being present in life that seems to leave […]
Context: Visualising Facebook I find it interesting that, beyond regional or other associated differences, a philosophical observation to be made is that the underlying and universal property here is that of recursive information system self-replication. So, we observe persons, cultures, national identities visually and linguistically self-replicating through a rapidly-evolving language and grammar of idiom, meme, […]
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 […]
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.
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 […]
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 […]
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; […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Daedelus Kite 