It is a truth almost universally known but rarely, if ever, acknowledged that the strengths and the values of our world are simultaneously its weakness and qualitative (as much as quantitative) poverty. Contemporary communications systems have, for instance, been truly wonderous – they have brought us all closer together through near-instaneous text, voice and video […]
It is a little hard not to feel somewhat dispossessed and saddened by the arc of catastrophe that human history traces in time. There is some essential adversarial turn in psychology and nature that provides and requires the entropy from which new forms of thought and life are able to emerge. We come to depend […]
The international society of nations, such as it is, is not very often seeking clever solutions to the problems that it itself is generating, across all countries and conflicts. Each instance of dissonance is a microcosm of a global property of discontinuity, a distributed planetary discord that is oblivious to nation or ideology and that we all are dealing with, wherever we are.
The entities and artefacts we make “in our own image” include the abstractions and patterns through which we understand and organise the world and ourselves.
Who benefits from stoking the fires of fear, insecurity and hatred?
Conspiracy theories are interesting, if for the most part demonstrably false. In the integrated information environment we live in, conspiracies are the little sisters of fake news but it is all on a colourful spectrum from plausible fiction to complete and utter bullshit.
The distributed information systems which we experience as social, cultural, economic and cognitive (or technologically-mediated) reality are implicitly weighted towards the self-replication and reproduction of existing patterns and biases.
A logic of self-organisation, information-pattern replication and complexity appears at every inflection of discovery to reveal itself as some kind of explanatory “master key”.
Information density is an interesting concept.
If a non-trivially complex organisational system of any kind or scale is to be considered (even notionally) as complete or entirely self-consistent, it can not also be adaptive, flexible and resilient.
Does human stupidity actually serve a sociological purpose ?
Humanity spends far too much time bickering and fighting over how we will collectively move forward to ever actually get on with the very serious business of actually ensuring our own continuity, survival and ongoing tenure on this planet.
Daedelus Kite 