The more that our inner worlds become outer artefacts, the more that our personal lives (now – thoughts) becomes commercial or surveillance data points, the more that the porous boundaries of psychological and material subjectivity disassemble and dissolve. A history, a culture, a civilisation predicated upon the ascendance of individuality (and it’s logical complement of […]
A curious, perhaps mischievous, property of complex adaptive systems is that they are autonomously biased towards the means and methods of their own optimal continuity, succinct encoding/self-representation and environmental self-propagation. In this sense, and while acknowledging that diverse actors can and do wilfully generate turbulence and confusion, a listless vessel of policy or doctrine is […]
Entering into life is always and ever to pass across an event horizon towards a dark infinity; all futures, freedom and choice trace an inevitable arc and trajectory towards singularity and extinction. Entropy provides limited degrees of freedom or choice but teleology binds us.
The generalised abstractions of partisan-political, ideological and economic self-interest are able to thrive in dissonant disunity. It is an environment that these abstractions themselves generate and that manifests the context and medium through which they most efficiently and effectively self-replicate. This is, among other things, precisely why the world has ever and always been a […]
To what extent does a procedural (i.e. temporal) experience of cognition, language, culture and technology bias us towards linear problem-solving and reductionist explanation? The aggregate sum of all (multithreaded) organisational heuristics may itself be a non-linear and adaptively dynamic system as a fact but from an individual thread of experience (within that gestalt), planning, problem-solving […]
Well, among other things… Entropy is a measure of the “degrees of freedom” available to a system. Generally-speaking, the more components, sub-systems, artefacts, entities that compose a system – the more degrees of freedom that are available to that system. Because there are always more possible disordered system states than ordered ones (in the total […]
There is a deepening feeling of doom (and gloom) as coronavirus begins to take hold across our community. We see the numbers growing daily; accelerating, exponentiating. At some point this will no longer be “someone else’s” illness, it will be upon us; a tidal surge of trillions of sinister nano-scale biological robots, wicked ribonucleic algorithms […]
This nauseating fear and gathering storm, the manifestation of an unacknowledged, unknown horror: our bodies were never impermeable, our minds – never infallible. The juggling, shuffling and dancing patterns of information and entropy from which we emerged – these were never some distant Otherness and isolated (or tamed) danger and threat of difference, of distance. […]
Fashion wears us more than we could ever be said to wear it; we only have these experiences and ideas in direct and reflexive proportion to the extent that they, in fact, have us. We do not search for meaning – it searches for us and there, finding us as so many yawning vacuums and […]
Zeitgeist.
Sociality and interdependence is our species’ strength but is simultaneously also our weakness. The complex networks and intangible feedback loops of behaviour, communication, material artefacts and technologies upon which we have built a Global civilisation, such as it is, are autonomously self-propagating information systems. Once such psychological, social and cultural systems have gained energy and […]
In our darkest hour, the breadth and depth of institutional insolvency unveils itself – as though we were not all already aware of the compound ethical, economic and intellectual bankruptcy of our era – and stands naked and useless like a balance sheet providing shelter from a storm.
Daedelus Kite 