Context: ‘It’s Going to Take a Long, Long Time.’ How the Uproar Over a Bollywood Lyric About Beyoncé Fits Into the Fight Against Colorism in India As Malcolm McLaren (as manager of the Sex Pistols) once noted – there is no such thing as bad publicity – he even cancelled performance to make the band […]
The “femme fatale”, a dangerous, panther-like beauty in which all of man’s desires and fears are realised in one gorgeous, dark and explosive bundle of alluring seduction and imminent volcano-like fury. This is the fantasy of woman upon which an unwitting, gullible and endlessly-amorous male identity anchors itself – in language, image, technology, culture and […]
An observation from Complex Systems Science: Regardless of those (internal or external) who might be seeking to generate more friction and to extract political or ideological value from it, the contemporary extremity of partisan adversarialism and dissonant turbulence that characterises the US political system has the characteristics of a dissipative system – that is, a […]
The question is surely as to a definition of meaning. As Russell remarked in “Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy”, all definitions are made in terms of other definitions – ergo and by way of endemic circularity there is no anchor or Archimedes Point upon which to hang notions of a “most meaningful” life. All meaning is […]
I do wonder if we perhaps miss the forest for the trees, here. The primary function and operational practice of any cognitive or cultural communications system is that of encoding self-replication as sustainable continuity. Where we are all quite intimately bound to and fascinated by these technologically-mediated interpersonal spaces, in an implicit near-narcotic and narcissistic […]
Partisan Political Systems have a double life as what is visible and what is not. What is not obvious is generally the most interesting (and causally critical) feature. If a complex information and/or energy-processing (i.e. computational) system maintains sustainable intrinsic homeostatic and extrinsic contextual continuity through the reflexive priming of its environment as a pliable […]
Information, like entropy, is always created. When considered in gestalt: successful cultural, technological or socioeconomic systems (and their diverse artefacts or entities) are autonomously-oriented towards self-propagation as biological as much as material facts of information and energy-processing. One of the common errors we make when we engage the growing presence of both amateur and professionally-bespoke […]
The ways that fear and stress shape cultures and nations may have corollary systems, symptoms and processes to those that haunt individual brains, personal experiences and memory. The amygdala hijack is in some places and at some times a distributed cultural phenomenon. Microcosm/macrocosm explanations are useful in this context but can be (and often are) […]
Context: The Calculus of Ought It is a curious world in which what can ever and only be proven from within the clockwork constraints of complex quantitative and logical tautologies might become the foundation and justification of and for ethical prescription. Of course, science is invaluable and proceeds from strength to strength by proof and […]
Is cyber security a complex game? Of course, it (i.e cyber) is all a game – of probability, of information entropy, of indefinitely-extensible logical or material systems and of successfully negotiating the vast and hyper-inflating, self-gravitating referential spaces of technology, communication and psychological or socioeconomic and ideological motivations that provide momentum here. To attenuate an […]
Could art (and its attendant adaptive contours of information artefacts or entities that we recognise as religion) ever have become what it was if representational technologies such as Instagram, Facebook or Twitter existed at the time of Jesus’ life, or even the Renaissance? Is religion a function of unknowing and does faith necessarily require the […]
…and there we all are, staring longingly into the mirror of our own projected aspirations to completeness, wholeness, happiness and peace; there only to discover that as soon as we identified the concept, the idea and Object of our desire – of our Self, of an Other or some compound material external entity or (self-)possession […]
Daedelus Kite 