Categories
politics

Rattling Sabers over the South China Sea

That the incompetent actions of one person can spark a global conflagration is a matter of the utmost absurdity. This indicates a failure of the intellect so rampantly oblivious to consequences as to be rightly-called “remedial”. On a broader scale, just what does the historical record reveal about the catastrophic fate of autocratic systems that […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Extraterrestrial Treaty

The first nation to engage in a treaty to leverage a learning relationship with an extraterrestrial civilisation shall likely find themselves so vastly overwhelmed by intelligence, technology and (all associated, downstream) complexity that they might later wish they had simply stayed in a cave sharpening the pointy sticks with which humans are so prone to […]

Categories
cybernetics

Disinformation

Nothing so certainly assures the formation, continuity and self-propagation of technologically-mediated communication systems at scale as do failures to successfully communicate. We should be less surprised that discontinuous social and political relations are in ascendance: the communications systems we inhabit are utterly dependent upon a threshold of dissonant entropy as primary mechanism of generative self-propagation. […]

Categories
Philosophy

Absent Meaning

On a topic of philosophy, language and communication: seek what is absent to understand what is present. System unity (and meaning) is a member of this inverse set and once we understand that logical absence is simply a different kind of presence, we edge a little closer to constructively disassembling a bona fide enigma of […]

Categories
Philosophy

Madness and Language

Among other things, language structurally and cognitively (as much as culturally) predisposes us through its endemic decomposability towards disconnection and discontinuity as a mechanism through which it then sustainably and adaptively self-propagates. We are broken in and as an evolving communications system that requires this disconnect to assure the recurrence of a persistent source of […]

Categories
Philosophy

Broken Technology

Technological problems invoke technological solutions which then reproduce the radiating speciation of (many) more problems. Consider the untenable nature of a developmental trajectory so pathologically intent upon, and commercially incentivised by, obfuscating its own conspicuous absence of certainty, self-consistency and teleological closure.

Categories
environment

Irreconcilable Differences

Is integration of ecology and technology an aspiration to unify catastrophically irreconcilable antitheses? If not, how?

Categories
Philosophy

Empty

Signs (like words, information, communication systems and the dependent subjectivities that so vigorously self-propagate through them) are intrinsically meaningless. Meaning and value are relational properties of communication systems such that complex dependencies render isolated nodes (or words, even persons) with a subtle kind of productive futility. Not so problematic from the interior referential perspective of […]

Categories
cybernetics

Ascendant Narcissism

The uncanny frequency with which narcissists percolate into positions of power is a function of the ways that the Rube Goldberg tesseract of ascendant organisational ecologies acquire an emergent orientation towards the self-selection of complementary, resonant character types. This is to say: there exists something of a distributed pathological bias for self-selecting personality traits that […]

Categories
Philosophy

War is a Wildfire

Trauma always begets more trauma and war is a wildfire that no one can control.

Categories
cybernetics Ontology Philosophy

AGI is a Zen thing

Curiouser and curiouser. When we map a living thing upon or within itself and in or through its own cognitive and representational hyper-extension of technological mediation, we find our minds engaging this all as an aspiration towards closure and control yet forever fall short of attaining that goal. We can not completely model or map […]

Categories
Philosophy

War Trauma

In many ways, these complex tragedies self-replicate through the trauma they invoke. It’s something that is so characteristically human that we often don’t perceive it. The systems of psychology, culture and communication that we (all) inhabit are quite naturally and autonomously oriented towards their own recursive self-propagation. A primary method of this replication has historically […]