As an observer of media and communications systems in regards to oversight, constraint and psychological, cultural or ideological aspirations to control and manipulate, there is a curious enigma and blind-spot in all attempts to surveillance as a method of control. That is, specifically, that asserting prohibition and censorship is only ever superficially able to provide […]
We are at times in danger of being so swept away by the symbolic, cultural and affective psychological tokens, artefacts and accessories of superficial beauty that we all might become little more than the hollow shells and vessels upon which these idioms and abstractions seek their own autonomously self-propagating continuity, through us and as us. […]
Disinformation is a mirrored labyrinth that no one can escape, but escaping – like truth – was never really the most important thing. A point worth noting is: these technologically-mediated information systems possess characteristics of what is known as “emergent complexity”. The form and flow of information and energy across (and as) these systems leverage […]
Viewed in gestalt from a holistic perspective, information systems are naturally predisposed to moving through the combinatorial possibility-spaces of entropy into dissonant states. The question is as to whether that dissonance represents a literal sociopolitical or interpersonal turbulence and concrete representation of lost and unrecoverable (i.e. adversarial, belligerently futile) information or energy-processing potential, OR, if […]
Difference and dissonance is neither intrinsically good or bad. It is endemic to information system self-replication and information systems are autonomously oriented towards the reproduction of a threshold level of “noise” or turbulence through which to optimally ensure resilience and continuity – this is how emergence manages to NOT produce the same things but represents […]
As an observer of media and communications systems in regards to oversight, constraint and psychological, cultural or ideological aspirations to control and manipulate, there is a curious enigma and blind-spot in all attempts to surveillance as a method of control. That is, specifically, that asserting prohibition and censorship is only ever superficially able to provide […]
There is in these delicate flowers such sweetness and unbounded longing for life. These cherry blossoms from my garden were full of life a few days ago and now they have faded, as though in accelerated decrepitude their moving frame of reference and colourful Spring joys are as short as they are glorious. Where pale […]
Bertrand Russell once remarked that all of mathematics consists of tautologies. In this sense, we are considering as logically foundational a vast, complex panoply of equivalences, equations, symmetries and relationships asserting unproblematic definitions, references, ontologies. It may be true that from within any system of reference, any conceptual schema whatsoever only acquires and maintains aspirational […]
The mystery of this “power of the collective” is not in the overt presence or tidal, cultural and narrative-psychological force it compels. It is in the many and diverse ways that individuals bound together by information, communication and shared experience or role find themselves as bearers of a meaning and a message which is hardly […]
The “wisdom of crowds” is, beyond the statistical phenomenon of mischievously accurate prediction, rarely approximate to any kind of wisdom whatsoever. Swept away in swells of emotional passion, people rarely notice that in seeking belonging and a salve or treatment for the irreducible existential uncertainties or emotional insecurities of life, they actually, wilfully surrender their […]
Turning a profit from loneliness through the promise and perfect fantasy of attention, loving gratitude and intimacy from beautiful people is the essence of all entertainment, all media and – if we’re to be particularly honest about the underlying psychological symmetries – of all business, all politics and all ideology.
In his classic Tao Te Ching (The Way of Life), Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu characterises the utility of what does not exist as being of profound importance. While there exist complex senses in which this illustrates a powerful gradient of logical thought, the fact is – and contrary to pretty much every single ideological position or […]
