The technologies with which we once aspired to any kind of teleological (or explanatory as aesthetic) closure and epistemological certainty have now proved much more effective in generating the inverse case.
Only the truly insane could ever see some kind of beauty or attraction in violence and war. It is because the tattered flags and broken bodies they invoke make the dark tar of their own hollow souls seem something less haunted, less futile. These are strange mad beasts and many of them are witless fools […]
Observe how we fear the generative mechanisms of our own self-reproduction. Language lives through us just as we do through it and were it not that the developers and the discoveries will unlikely be put back in their genie bottles any time soon, we might successfully regulate the rapidly percolating uncertainties that our own unbounded […]
It is precisely because conflict is a kind of communication that it persists so far beyond the infancy of our species. Artefacts and entities of communication remain in this world for as long as they do through the many ways they endlessly reproduce themselves both through and as us. War, fear and hatred perennially percolate […]
War is a widow, an orphan, a dusty grave and a lonely field of grief and sorrow. Image: stable diffusion.
There is little doubt that our cultural systems are communications networks, albeit of considerably higher dimensionality than (even) the digital telecommunications systems with which we are all now so necessarily well-acquainted. In a spirit of relatively non-specific philosophical reflection, questions quite naturally arise as to the carrying capacity of these cultural networks and of what […]
If virtue was innate or actually worth something beyond an advertising slogan of social merit, would it have to be as performative and theatrical as it so commonly is? It is worth reflecting that anyone who feels compelled to endlessly demonstrate their moral virtue very likely possesses none whatsoever.
When words finally fail us, we might have actually found something worthwhile to say.
When encountering the serially haunted futility of so much of our species’ belligerently selfish behavioural vocabulary, I often resort to an attempted witty quip to the effect that this is, yet again and quite simply, “human beings being human”. It is not after all as though most who conduct themselves in variously disgraceful ways have […]
Is artificial intelligence going to destroy social media? Would it even matter if it might not also destroy us in the process? These are fractal tesseracts of linguistic narcissism as wheels within wheels of technologically mediated autopoiesis. Will we be able to see anything outside the half-mirrored sphere of reflective, reflexively dopamine-boosting narrative self-engagement? There […]
Nope. If nothing else and far beyond the actual sophisticated engineering (*not* rhetorical) problem this represents, to render life endless is simultaneously to render it meaningless. It may not always be obvious but value is not anywhere near so much a function of abundance as it is of scarcity. It is the transience of our […]
We prefer ingesting prose that reflexively confirms back to us the identities and systems of belief we perceive ourselves as inhabiting. As a general observation of the mischievously discontinuous arc and trajectory of this plausibly ineradicable narcissism that compels our choices, actions and words – the texts we prefer tend to be slightly off-center and […]
Daedelus Kite 