We woke up today to the world’s worst air quality in Australia’s capital, Canberra. I am still waiting for political leadership on the topic of Climate Change but expecting instead: more dismissive parochialism and institutionalised, ideological denialism and avoidance. Context: Canberra’s air quality is ‘the worst in the world’ as bushfire smoke shrouds capital
Author: G
Categories
Technology is a double-edged sword
Double-edged swords are the rule, rather than the exception, it seems and it is in general a monumental communications failure that risks and vulnerabilities are not sufficiently (publicly) acknowledged and appropriately managed. Should technology creators be held responsible for the potential disorder and malfeasance to which their products and technologies are applied? Notwithstanding the economic […]
A game of information, influence and seeded (or targeted) turbulence is unlikely to be winnable (or won) by reproducing and reinforcing the structural, organisational components that merely reproduce and self-validate the axioms, grammars and rules of that game. These games are won by rewriting the rules; by extending an existing grammar and logical framework in […]
Driving tonight, someone took this photo over my shoulder. We had been to the city and I decided to drive past the airport. As we crested a hill we were engulfed in smoke. This was smoke from fires over a hundred kilometers away. The South-East coast of New South Wales has been inundated with bushfires. […]
Categories
Friendly Fire: Politics, Philosophy
The politicians are very similar, in general, to the philosophers; they seek value and utility through finding new ways to divide, to separate, to objectify and to create both distance and difference in the world. This endless definition and referential inflation is of course nothing more than an introduction of more information, more complexity and […]
Categories
Fire Fighting: Extinguishing Self
This world of inflated, tangled emptiness is the world we have together made and together we will watch as it actively disassembles itself. The mysterious and unknowable vacuum beyond knowledge is essentially the same logical entity as is the foundational void within it. Epistemological certainty and self-identity or self-knowledge are limited by the same essential […]
Categories
Free Fire: Nonexistence of Self
You do not exist. Not, at least beyond that very limited aggregate of abstractions, words, images, ideas and narrative (or cultural) conventions within which you find yourself embedded and as a transient expression of. It is a little-known fact that from within any non-trivially sophisticated system of ordered symbols, logic and (inevitably, also) psychology and […]
Categories
Big Ideas: Cultivating Curiosity
If intellectual curiosity was nurtured, cultivated, allowed to grow wild and free upon the fertile soils of this grand experiment that is our shared history, where might we all be? Innovation is celebrated but is everywhere suffocated by a culture of convention and conformity.
Work into refining the viability of octopus farming continues apace. I doubt that there is any other animal on Earth the farming of which would so closely resemble the cultivation of extraterrestrial life. Reflections on a big(ger) picture: In what ways does accelerated aquaculture only continue to generate the problems which have led to the […]
Organisational systems tend to autonomously acquire and reflexively cultivate those (generally adaptive) sets of abstractions, assumptions and boundaries which best-serve the continued persistence and self-propagation of those homeostatic, corporate organisational patterns themselves. An enduring abstraction of parochial self-importance indicates the point at which historically-justifiable self-belief fractures into precisely the kind of narrative (psychological) pathology that […]
Categories
Multidimensional Heuristics
Multidimensional heuristics are those forms of analysis that, rather than attempting a cumulative or brute force aggregation and hard interpretation of data, seek recursive logical insight through intuitive reconfiguration and subtractive recombination of existing patterns. It is true that our minds and acquired or entrained cognitive methods, as much as the procedural artefacts and coded […]
Why does homelessness occur and why is it so difficult to find and apply lasting solutions? In a nutshell: Entropy. This is not a rhetorical affectation but as an authentic explanatory and causal explanation. Many socioeconomic problems are complex but within a relatively limited problem “dimensionality” – consider crowd control or public transport. They are […]
Daedelus Kite 