Category: culture

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culture

Embracing Difference

There are some failing metaphysical assumptions and troubled subjectivities in the notionally “Western” position and its attendant parochialisms. A drift through deterministic materialism and downstream mechanical (or algorithmic) thinking into untenable philosophical positions also seems somewhat inevitable, if perhaps not entirely irremediable. I am constantly fascinated (and yet to be quite honest also simultaneously horrified) […]

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culture

Academic Stasis

Those artefacts, entities and systems that percolate to ascendance in any particular organisational context tend to be as persistent, as suffocating and as self-interested as they are brittle and prone to catastrophic disassembly when encountering significant environmental perturbation. The diminishing returns on disruptive science are a function of an academic system that has undergone pathological […]

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communication

Disinformation Wars

In a distributed, ubiquitous information space, everything (including this brief paragraph) is in play. While it is true that complex communications systems can (and do) have many centers of gravity, some of the interesting considerations here orbit a fact that the ascendant networks and platforms of information transmission maximally persist as a function of replicability, […]

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culture

Fiction

Fiction as myth is humanity’s first form of collaborative, cultural self-simulation. Clear boundaries between systems of belief and proven facts might forever be intricately indeterminate but the power and consequence of fiction is unquestionable. The role and power of creative language and an unbounded (if pragmatic) technological imagination should never be misunderestimated. The speculative forecasting […]

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politics

Language Makes Tyrants

Context: Geopolitics is for losers It is always worth considering the extent to which the longer frequency waves as oscillating ebb and tide of history are also those of the communications systems, of the languages and self-validating dialects of ideologically-inflected political narrative. The kinds of ideological and political system that tend to emerge as convergent […]

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culture

Enigmatic Culture

The cultural systems that sustain us and that equally generate and render our experience of identity and community as intelligible are simultaneously the borders, boundaries and epistemological horizons that constrain us. This is one among many enigmatic flows of information and energy that persist as a function of their inhibitory as much as of their […]

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politics

Political Chaos

Context: World Politics at the Edge of Chaos: Reflections on Complexity and Global Life I have been deep down a rabbit hole of seeking to apply these complexity thinking insights more broadly for the last few years. One key, kernel and core takeaway is that (we) human beings seem on the whole quite poorly equipped […]

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art

Shocking AI Art is actually Nothing New

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 […]

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culture

Starry, Starry Night: an Artist’s Burden

The artist’s burden as unbounded, unrecognised arc and trajectory is really a microcosm of the resistance to change and insight (as individuality, creativity, compassion) that we all face in life. An irony of this is that, not only is an artist’s message so rarely understood or acknowledged during their own lifetimes, but this obscurity is […]

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culture

The Achilles’ Heel of Totalitarian Adversarialism

Context: US strategic policy in Taiwan needs to change as China shows it has capacity to take the island by force Interesting article but I have to wonder about the nature of the psychological factors and essentially pathological dependence of totalitarian ideologues upon the narratives and endless preparation for confrontation. More important than the actual […]

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technology

AI is Huge, but…

AI is big. Huge. Consequential beyond anything we might have previously known was even on the technological radar of accelerating sociotechnical self-propagation but it does not and never could provide teleological closure. This is a reflection on foundational incompleteness and logical indeterminism. I think that it’s instructive to remark that the aspirational trajectories (as individuals, […]

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culture

Smart Weapons, Dumb Wars (slight return)

To repeat: The only reason we need smart weapons is because we are too stupid to stop fighting wars.