What already seems as though it were some distant, mythical past when human beings gathered en masse in carelessly-shared social places and no one had to hold their breath or jealously secure their body-borders for fear of some invisible viral death. How soon we forget the frenzied rush and crush of crowds, the night-lit noisy […]
Category: Alien Anthropology
Instagram Influencers
Human beings copy each other, it provides a modest respite from implicit psychological insecurities. They copy each other copying each other because they are tribal creatures and for all this aspirational social or cultural identity construction – they are all so easily led, swept away by trends and peer pressure or commercial desperation. After a […]
COVID-19: Pandemic Logic
From a purely logical standpoint – the implicit, endemic and enduring possibility for (and probability of) systemic extensibility is by recursive insight and bootstrapped self-inflection back into the structure of a system itself. The most profoundly deleterious vulnerabilities in, for instance, Cybersecurity are those 0-day pearls which, like axiomatic booby-traps just waiting to be triggered […]
…the beauty of this art is also the beauty of our minds and the myriad ways that pattern and concept so sweetly, seductively deceive us all. How easily our eyes, our minds, are fooled and how fast an impulse is invoked by the simplest of strokes and a surrender to sweet and wilful projection. We […]
The Coronavirus Blues
A few weeks (is it two, or three, now?) into isolation and social distancing, it is all starting to get a bit depressing. Never being anything much of a social butterfly at the best of times, I still feel a visceral burden of dread and anxiety mounting, an overwhelming sense of dread and emptiness. There […]
Social Distancing
…and in all of our isolation, our distant alienation from all the life we once knew, when all social contact and that intimacy or literal warmth of another’s presence and friendship has become a silent vacuum of absence – what do we have left? We have our empty, listless lives and the dawning awareness that […]
Pandemic: a world under siege
The generalised abstractions of partisan-political, ideological and economic self-interest are able to thrive in dissonant disunity. It is an environment that these abstractions themselves generate and that manifests the context and medium through which they most efficiently and effectively self-replicate. This is, among other things, precisely why the world has ever and always been a […]
Entropy Binds
To what extent does a procedural (i.e. temporal) experience of cognition, language, culture and technology bias us towards linear problem-solving and reductionist explanation? The aggregate sum of all (multithreaded) organisational heuristics may itself be a non-linear and adaptively dynamic system as a fact but from an individual thread of experience (within that gestalt), planning, problem-solving […]
The Storm is upon us all…
There is a deepening feeling of doom (and gloom) as coronavirus begins to take hold across our community. We see the numbers growing daily; accelerating, exponentiating. At some point this will no longer be “someone else’s” illness, it will be upon us; a tidal surge of trillions of sinister nano-scale biological robots, wicked ribonucleic algorithms […]
This nauseating fear and gathering storm, the manifestation of an unacknowledged, unknown horror: our bodies were never impermeable, our minds – never infallible. The juggling, shuffling and dancing patterns of information and entropy from which we emerged – these were never some distant Otherness and isolated (or tamed) danger and threat of difference, of distance. […]
Zeitgeist.
Beyond the self-evident inadequacies of our integrated bureaucratic hierarchies, the labyrinth of systemic biases which have funneled wealth into corporate welfare and monopolistic hegemonies are now revealing their utter ineptitude at providing adequate socioeconomic resilience. You could ask why no one saw this coming. Many people did, they just did not know what shape or […]