The true mystery of art lies not in the many ways that it is a “thing”, in the mischievously multiplicitous subtleties of manifestation; it rests in the many (more) ways in which it is a vacuum, a void, a potentiality and the endless presence of absence. We seek meaning in matter but fail to understand […]
The more we reflexively structure, cultivate and sediment our cultural identities, psychological subjectivity and civilisation around (and through) a limiting grammar and vocabulary of runaway greed, the more we find ourselves trapped in a spiral of accelerating entropy. Context: Thomas Keneally’s 2020s vision: We must abandon the language of the market to reclaim our humanity
Narrative dissonance is a necessary component of social communication; an autonomous method for introducing the useful information entropy of difference through which biological, cognitive and cultural systems evolve and maintain resilience against catastrophic disassembly. This difference has become acute, amplified by technology and it’s consequences have all but shredded political civility.
Questions could be asked of whether institutional contexts inadvertently invoke bullying, cognitive dissonance and tribal dominance behaviours. Like arguing on social media, people are unconsciously driven in this direction, psychologically and behaviourally “shaped” by their context.
It is not surprising that the symbolic abstractions and mental worlds of homo sapiens arrive at incompleteness and negation but “deficiency” is a word perhaps altogether too easily attributed affective, emotional qualities. The indefinite extensibility of (both) logical and material systems, and each in their own ways invoking parameters and probabilities unique to their own […]
The curious thing about the psychology of taboos is that (generally speaking) the more a thing is prohibited, the more psychological currency and cultural value it (inversely) acquires, and – consequently – the more the associated behaviours self-propagate. We might identify this counterintuitive displacement of value, meaning and fascination (or attention) as semiotic elasticity.
Information systems, viewed from a gestalt/holistic perspective, possess many properties we might otherwise recognise as self-propagation, “emergence” or self-organisation. The presence of values attributed semantic (or logical) properties of truth or falsity at a level of cognition or language may be purely incidental. From a Global Systems perspective, information systems autonomously pursue the optimal means […]
While it is true that there is no such thing as a perfect political system, some forms of social organisation clearly possess greater resilience than others. This current epidemiological catastrophe is clear evidence of the implicit failures of authoritarian information control. https://twitter.com/howroute/status/1225480460979056642?s=09 The mechanical, austere logical function of authoritarian states generates deep fragility in their […]
These information environments are biased towards the accelerated throughput and bandwidth of data, largely blind to truth values. The self-propagating gestalt of integrated digital information systems appear to require this constant throughput to avoid over-extension and self-gravitational collapse. It is something of a constant back-filling and hyper-inflating referential effervescence of naked data, sans semantics or […]
I honestly wonder sometimes if we make sense of the world or if the world makes sense of (and through) us; it is most certainly true that the information patterns of this world inhabit our minds just as much as we inhabit them. Cognitive biases, for instance, are those endemic psychological faux pas through which […]
There is a certain childish wish-fulfilment in many ideological, economic and political descriptions (and their associated, self-inflected, experience) of reality. This is a simplicity sought in an order and a taxonomy or categorical differentiation, difference and the abstract “distance” of Other(ing) which seeks to impose structure where there rarely is any. Or at least there […]
To what extent can any nation (or ideology) ever successfully isolate itself without toxic consequence? Time’s arrow of cultural, technological metamorphosis is defined by a progressive sedimentation of connectivity, network edges; everything else is atavistic wish-fulfilment.
Daedelus Kite 