Categories
technology

Future of Work: Will AI create a Vocational Apocalypse?

What is perhaps most disturbing about the artival of autonomous systems and AI is not the plausible inevitability of monumental vocational disruption; it is that there are so few ongoing or persistent, well-informed and broadly-accessible public and (non-partisan) political discussions regarding the extent to which these upheavals will reshape entire economic, social and cultural value […]

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culture

Leadership

The nature of leadership, at least beyond any simplistic caricature, is surely as an emergent pivot and catalyst for change. All members of an organisation are actors in this – the distributed leadership quotient – and the emergence of critical, decision-making nodes such as those we identify as “leaders” is perhaps merely an autonomous and […]

Categories
culture

We are the distributed medium of cultural information transmission…

There exists a radical misunderstanding and of the nature and of the role information plays in our lives and world. We do not possess or own information in any substantive sense – at least not beyond a certain superficial psychological or cultural attachment that really only serves to mask the many ways that information, in […]

Categories
culture

Should We Stop Making Stupid People Famous ?

There is a well-known meme which features a photograph of a notoriously unintelligent celebrity – take your pick, there are certainly plenty to choose from – with the accompanying text: “stop making stupid people famous.” The thing is – stupid people might actually be the perfect candidates for celebrity. These lucky (or – if we […]

Categories
culture

Climate Inaction: Let the Bumbling Begin

Never mind that the sum-total of all available evidence is so profound that the only plausible chance anyone has of not believing that Climate Change is upon us is to either be so naive or so maliciously ignorant that it is impossible to admit this fact into their personal conceptual vocabulary and interpretive framework of […]

Categories
technology

Technology: Misunderstanding Each Other

Has anyone (else) noticed that the proliferation of communications technologies has occurred in direct proportion to the level of misunderstanding and confusion in the world? It is not that we do anything new by misinterpreting each other’s intentions – as people have been doing this for as long as there have been people – we […]

Categories
culture

Slavery

It is a beautiful, tragic irony that the most powerful symbol against slavery might be that of the stone slave, themselves eternally imprisoned in time and matter.  There is something in this: the symbol creates and represents what it detests;  minds (and cultures) create their own unwitting blind-spots in this way. Slavery is of course […]

Categories
culture

Encoding Culture, Encrypting Identity

Conjecture: We are encoding culture but we are encrypting identity. It is not well-understood – partially because those procedural mechanisms and autonomously self-propagating waveforms (or functions) of patterned information that manifest as, in and through ourselves must also protect themselves and their own aspirational continuity. If it were immediately apparent how mental worlds and cultural […]

Categories
culture

On Mechanism, Holism and (an) Organisational Logic of Life

On mechanism and holism: we often enough mistake the discrete, bounded artefacts with which we are presented as being the reality and substance of this world when it is the immaterial abstractions and a matrix of interdependence and representational cross-reference between them which is the true reality. This is where a “logic of life” manifests […]

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culture

Reality Inversion: The Emptiness in Art

“Reality” is a subtle concept. An artist creates an artefact, a fact, a reality through the skillful convergence of other facts. Those other references and earlier, representational facts were similarly composed of other, earlier facts. This is how our minds (and cultures) endlessly rebuild this world. In this way – we often mistake the discrete, […]

Categories
culture Philosophy

Libraries are Mirrors

This city… the morning sun rises as though summoned by the gently floating hot air balloons and here, the National Library of Australia is so wonderfully, poetically framed in representational space.  This architecture – like some ancient Greek monument to a memory of the Gods and their dramas; but the only theatre here is that […]

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culture

Reflective Subjectivity

I wonder what she is reading.  It may be the eternal burden of a reflective mind to be unable to simply accept reality at face value, to question what lies beneath, to investigate what hidden meanings or purposes might exist or dwell below or behind the superficial appearances of things.  At least she is not […]