Context: The surprising role death plays in the stability of ecosystems There’s a sense in which viable biological systems persist as a function of their ability to offset entropy as dissipative disorder to their environments. When these viable systems are themselves the combinatorial gestalt that an ecosystem represents, there is no externality or reservoir into […]
The generative role of death and decay reaches far beyond the simple yet significant facts of nutrient cycles into narrative and memory. I am endlessly fascinated by the ways in which our cultures, languages and selves are wrapped around this irreducibly hollow fact of mortality and transience. Pick a culture, a time, a place and […]
This morning I read an interesting online aphorism from a wise school that suggested that most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment. Much the same might be said, in functional microcosm, of the perceived value of a social media post or comment. We could ask how […]
The essence of all totalitarian regimes is that of the brutal oppression of their own people by any and all possible methods. The violent oppression of women in particular has a leading place in this current litany of relentless attrocities. The Iranian regime is grounded in and sustained by its pathological obsession with the control […]
Context: If We Make Contact With Aliens The Biggest Danger Will Be Our Politicians, Say Scientists Yes. It is quite true that the communication systems endemic to our species have had a catastrophic tendency to percolate precisely the wrong kinds of self-interested personalities into positions of power. While it is not always the case that […]
It’s certainly an interesting faultline, the arrival of all this AI-generated creative material. I suspect that, rather than devalue human creativity, and once the dust settles from the first few waves of grossly over-used generative AI design, an authenticated artist’s work will actually acquire more – not less – value. The general arc and trajectory […]
What is known (or is believed to be known) varies, adapts and undergoes the relentless metamorphosis of entangled streams of intersubjective abstraction we experience as cultural (and now, explicitly, technological) reality, but amongst all this effervescing percolation and uncertain intentions of identity and difference there remains a constant. The song, that is, remains the same […]
Armageddon is in the news just now – how strange to have a word which invokes the end of all meanings, a system of belief that renders all belief as void and an Imperialist state that unwittingly seeks to atomise all kingdoms, all kings. The gullibility of people never ceases to amaze me and yet […]
Have you ever noticed how even the most deliberate thought collapses at the boundary where concept attempts to become utterance? The effervescent liminality between inner image and external word sediments itself between lived cognition and its skeletal representation. Thought arrives whole, textured, multi-dimensional. Language receives it late, fragmented, already reduced. In the act of speaking […]
The strangest thing about being a person and having an identity is that none of those concepts and labels or phrases and idioms we build our selves around actually belong to us. To be a person, an individual, an identifiable difference as distinct from all the background colour and noise of whichever time and place […]
I wonder if we whisper little doubts to ourselves as ways of staying alive. Entertaining certainties is reassuring but leads to complacency and this, in turn, can lead to catastrophe. It is worth remembering that the definitions and identities we inhabit are only as bounded and certain as are the languages with which we inflate […]
The borders and boundaries as definitions and shared narratives which define us become even more valuable and important when they are perceived as under threat. The totalitarian political playbook begins (and ends) with the fabrication and cultivation of profoundly insecure borders, boundaries and differences that allow them to masquerade as strength and certainty, to play […]
Daedelus Kite 