The objective function of civilisation is not wealth, growth or power. It is the continual reproduction of the conditions that make civilisation itself possible.
Author: G
The result is a civilisation increasingly confronted by novel problems, yet repeatedly encouraged to admire the elegance with which it preserves the assumptions that produced them.
AI accelerates language’s own tendency to reproduce its most probable forms through us.
Categories
the strange ontology of power
Extreme wealth is not independence. It is an unusually successful dependence upon everyone else.
Categories
question authority
Institutions do not merely preserve knowledge. They determine what knowledge is permitted to become visible.
Political absurdity generates the volatility through which technology acquires influence, while technology increasingly reproduces the conditions that keep political absurdity alive.
Categories
simple, simpler, simplistic
The persistence of populist political narratives as a function of transmissibility explains how and why verifiable truth becomes secondary in public debate.
Categories
enlightenment
Enlightenment begins where the search for certainty ends.
Categories
selling subscription selves
We no longer simply use technology, we now continuously rebuild ourselves and our lives into forms it can recognise, predict and sell.
Categories
dire straits: the economics of delay
Mechanisms created to manage a recurring condition may become dynamically coupled to, and dependent upon, the continued existence of that condition.
Categories
recursion, technically
Field logic describes the recursively antisymmetrical organisation of difference by which systems continually reshape the probability of their own continuity.
Categories
the oldest questions
Life may not need a planet. It may only need matter, persistent gradients of energy, memory, and enough time for (ie self-) organisation to become aware of itself.
Daedelus Kite 