I’m a committed advocate for the importance of systems theory, cybernetics and complexity science but the solution of communication precisely is the problem. It is not a bundle of ideas or throwaway conceptual vocabularies that can ever compress down to a brief logo. The conservation of cognitive as much as cultural resources predisposes people to […]
I find the range and spectrum of generative ambiguity around the concept (and definition) of complexity to itself be quite interesting. We find in language (as much as in technology but both as hyper-extended corollaries of cognition) these mischievously self-propagating confusions and constructive indeterminacies around concepts like complexity, entropy and emergence. Otherwise rendered: the most […]
Context: Language Modelling at Scale: Gopher, Ethical considerations, and Retrieval There is perhaps no more salient feature in the landscape of accelerating technological metamorphosis than that of the many and varied ways that artificial intelligence is recursively shaping the shared vocabularies of our current historical moment. Language holds a special place in that not only […]
Long before media and/or technology companies inadvertently harvested this endemic bias towards dissociative subjectivity construction by way of social media confessional as functional neuroses, it has been a core feature of organisational systems and – before them – as the breaking symmetries and phase transitions of emergent novelty as difference or entropy in complex dynamical […]
An enigma: the shambling, self-propagating golem [let’s not kid ourselves – it’s much more Frankenstein than Jetsons] of mass/social communications systems maximally self-propagates and recursively reproduces itself through precisely the dissonant turbulence that we are now obligated to engage as both an existential threat and aperture of opportunity. How, in other words, to bootstrap, loop […]
The thing about lies and falsehoods or fakes and the aggregate self-deception of contemporary technologically-mediated information landscapes is that we generally fail to acknowledge that communication has never been primarily about truth. Communication serves first and foremost as a primary mechanism and transmission medium in and as which information systems optimally self-propagate and, as fakes […]
Much of the analytical (academic) discourse regarding social system self-propagation gets swept up and away by the effective subset of communication and information propagation that it, itself, represents. The point: human social systems not only exhibit but constitutively are the distributed mnemonics and information artefacts they produce. Academic and institutional contexts derive value (and relevance) […]
Information entropy wears many masks. The reason that fakes fly further and faster than facts is, similarly, because they carry more information entropy as potential energy or consequence. This is an issue of complex systems dynamics and holistic logical analysis which is still, on the whole, very poorly understood and inadequately articulated at an academic […]
Context: Influencing the mind of an adversary It really makes me wonder what the future (or present) utility of statistical approaches combining neurobiological feedback orchestrated or forecasted through and as machine learning might be. The commercial extraction of utility through social media via algorithmic abbreviation and influence is clearly just such a practice. These brains […]
Some general philosophical questions and reflections on disinformation: To what extent is disinformation not only evidence of directed or (even, in a limited sense) desirable artefacts, belief systems or entities, and to what extent is disinformation itself an irreducible property of large-scale sociotechnical systems? Our languages and institutional, geopolitical and self-organisational logics require we leverage […]
The old Nietzschean idiom about the abyss staring back seems apt here – as we gaze into an abyss of political chaos, partisan insecurity, confusion and intractable information complexity. This is precisely what is being done in the US right now through externally (and internally) sourced disinformation. Notice that, agnostic of truth-value, distributed patterns of […]
A recent quick dip and paddle into one of the big social media platforms revealed what is probably quite starkly and bleedingly obvious to other observers: attempts (by pretty much anyone) to say anything that is not entirely trivial and inconsequential, regardless of perceived or actual bias or partisan agenda, creates an enormous flurry of […]
Daedelus Kite 