Categories
Alien Anthropology

Online Communication: Talking Underwater

All of this online communication really feels a bit like trying to talk (or shout) underwater; no one can hear us and no one is really listening or paying attention anyway.  The greatest misdirection and deception of this is that while we are (all) here pouring our hearts and minds out into this digital information […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Freedom Game

Freedom of Self is a game we play in which we trade an Other’s control for our own.  In all the sparkle and fireworks of our relentless jubilation we fail to recognise that we still play by the same rules and are in essence no more free than we were before. Additionaly: we free to […]

Categories
Philosophy

A Cultural Vacuum of Self

The strangest thing about personal identity and subjective psychological experience is that, at core, it consists solely of internalised references to an external world of images, ideas, idioms, languages and conventions.  This “external” world is only ever the substantive collection and dynamic aggregate of all of those other individual nodes, similarly empty, and swimming in […]

Categories
culture

Commercial Identities: Generational Difference

Notice how the primary cultural differentiation of generational identity is always a commercially-mediated product, idiom or artefact.  Can anyone ever truly own their expression of identity, of cultural self when it is always already so much someone else’s possession? Does commercial self-interest (even unwittingly) cultivate a possibility for the emergence of self-identity and t h […]

Categories
communication Complexity culture

Disassembling Control: Talent, Technology and Entropy

In any context where an employment and technology ecosystem is so rapidly evolving – recognising talents, skills and aptitude becomes about as difficult and as (ultimately and) unmanageably complex as acquiring or maintaining them. What interests me here is a second-order semantic analysis: there is such an efflorescence of salient wisdom and clever advice available, […]

Categories
Philosophy Psychology

The Disconcerting Essence of Personal Non-Existence

There is absolutely and irrevocably nothing more likely to raise the hackles and turn a good conversation bad than to willingly or unwittingly call into question another person’s core belief system. Beyond this, and far outside (or is that inside?) the problematic orbits of political ideology, cultural convention and personal interpretations of the rich smorgasbord […]

Categories
technology

Logic: Indefinite Extensibility

The indefinitely extensible essence of logic (Gödel, 1931) is both bug *and* feature. That which provides a possibility of recombinatory (technological, organisational, psychological) development, of the degrees of freedom by which we might define (and endlessly redefine) the meaning and substance of “intelligence” or “technology”, is also the tangled hierarchy of inertia and entropy within […]

Categories
technology

AI: Engineering Intelligence

I wonder in what ways the “engineering of intelligence” recursively shapes, and to some extent prescribes the most probable developmental vectors of, our definition of human intelligence. We may find ourselves several years from now seeking the inflection points and procedural saliences that explain why it is that our core assumptions and concepts of intelligence […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

The Machines, the Mirrors and the Emptiness of Self

The image in the mirror of psychological self-reflexivity is the machine, the rational, the explicable and the logic which has through so many, many iterations become what we now recognise as information and communications technology. An aspirational aptitude towards anticipatory self-explanation is always, perhaps, only ever going to appear or manifest as the percolated surface […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Selfish Blind-Spot

What to say when the central factor obscuring self-knowledge and all aspirations towards peace, unity, equitable prosperity and a long-term, sustainable global civilisation is standing right there in plain sight? The psychological blind-spot in our collective vision is our Self.

Categories
culture technology

The Constancy and Enduring Paranoia of Digital Security Updates

Cyber security is now just a part of everyday life. Update, update, update… all this requires is a sufficiently entertaining marketing campaign to elaborate and celebrate the fulfilment of a life spent in the gamified Panopticon of endless technical paranoia and system updates; sitcoms and lifestyle gurus explaining the invaluable personal experience of incessant technical […]

Categories
technology

Impenetrable Online Encryption: Logic Seeks to Differ

An encrypted internet for all? An impressive technology, to be sure, but the nature and the essence of this game of information assurance and technological systems is surely that – not only does a ratchet up the ladder of sophisticated security add complexity (and an associated information entropy regarding degrees of freedom) to a context […]