Categories
culture

Cultural Anxiety

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) […]

Categories
culture

Quantitative Methods for Ethical Prescription?

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 […]

Categories
technology

Cyber: The House Always Wins

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 […]

Categories
culture

Art as a Function of Ignorance

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 […]

Categories
culture

There is No Self, No Other; just the Love that binds them…

…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 […]

Categories
technology

Disconnection

The more we all become digitally connected, the less we actually and sincerely connect. There is a vast (and possibly inevitable) vacuum of trust and faith in each other, in interpersonal or international bonding and in humanity. This lack of trust leads us all, for the most part, to seek to share and inhabit the […]

Categories
culture Philosophy

It is all Fiction

We are all quite simply role-playing: doing what it is that we think that someone like that who we believe we are should be doing, regardless that there is no one thing that anyone actually is. Fascinated by this internalised mirror image of Other as Self, we find ourselves transfixed by fantasy and illusion. Even […]

Categories
technology

AI: The Rolling Disaster of Technological Accessorising

I would never suggest that any of us should let the truth get in the way of a good story (or sales pitch and project management agile scrum), but observe how often we end up with the developmental and technological cart placed (well) before the horse. Developments in AI tend towards various unknown (perhaps – […]

Categories
technology

Technological Innovation: Blue-Sky Dreaming

Context: Graceful robotic swifts take flight in latest Festo demo Fascinating technologies. We should perhaps not be all that surprised when these technologies approach (if asymptotically) the neurophysiological and anatomical metabolic efficiencies and long-evolved adaptive aptitudes and spontaneous information-entropy-generation of living systems. Work is already and clearly being done in this area. Long-range blue-skies thinking […]

Categories
technology

Technology Copies Itself Through Us

What I find unrelentingly entertaining about the technologically-mediated collective and aspirationally-individuated self-definitions of our historical moment is not that we (all, and each in our own ways) seek to create and sustain these distributed and functionally differential or dissociative Others of self-representation that we endlessly cultivate. What is more interesting is that we rarely notice, […]

Categories
art

Loss and Dusty Desolation

A landscape of dusty desolation is beautiful as bare reminder or relic memory of each wonderful thing that no longer dwells there. The broken building brings a nameless frame that haunts this hallowed emptiness like scrub green masks hang dry mist upon the shallow valley. Sparse Somali scene, a momento mori under the infinite emptiness […]

Categories
poetry

Double Bubble Ballad

We two passing bubbles bind in tender bond and balance find in each that missing part of each that is in and of the other’s emptiness.