An encrypted internet for all? An impressive technology, to be sure, but the nature and the essence of this game of information assurance and technological systems is surely that – not only does a ratchet up the ladder of sophisticated security add complexity (and an associated information entropy regarding degrees of freedom) to a context […]
Cognitive diversity represents that useful, recombinatory information entropy from which insight and innovation assert and reproduce or replicate themselves. A subtle, adaptive balance between self-propagating continuity and incessant metamorphosis is the source of as many evolutionary wonders as it is of the abstract information origami of psychological, cultural and technological enigmas with which we are […]
Categories
Crazy Circles: Life’s Game of Chance
On a summer Saturday road trip, listening to a song (“Crazy Circles“) by old rock band Bad Company and the lyrics caught me mid-thought on a topic of entropy and political power: “Life is just a game of chance.” While it is true that life is fundamentally random and the large-scale statistical drift into patterns […]
It may be a matter of social and psychological necessity that this kind of monumental existential threat – to which we have perhaps long been desensitised by repetition and the droning monotony of unnecessarily adversarial ideological and political competition – carry more impact, more information entropy and cultural gravity when they become a tangible, material, […]
Categories
Rethinking Social Media
I came across an interesting idea today: the production of a new, reliable, verifiable, safe and trustworthy social media platform. My reflex was to think: what of the tendency of information and energy-processing (i.e. communications) systems to autonomously drift into optimally-concise patterns and methods of self-propagation? There is no particular brilliance about Facebook et. al. […]
Utopian aspirations are inevitably three parts marketing and one part plausibility. While communication (as much as communications platforms or technologies) is necessarily a matter of endlessly effervescent linguistic or logical self-inflection, the implicit openness of our contemporary context and the cognitive hyper-extension of technological complexity represents cost and burden as much as it does utility. […]
Organisational and technological systems are generally structured by linear, procedural and additive modular methods. The new degrees of freedom available at a logical level are rarely acknowledged. Unexplored, abstract logical spaces of literal higher-dimensionality also exist. Higher dimensions are not magical, metaphysical mystery tours in some “other” spatial place or additional bolt-on to reality; they […]
We woke up today to the world’s worst air quality in Australia’s capital, Canberra. I am still waiting for political leadership on the topic of Climate Change but expecting instead: more dismissive parochialism and institutionalised, ideological denialism and avoidance. Context: Canberra’s air quality is ‘the worst in the world’ as bushfire smoke shrouds capital
Categories
Technology is a double-edged sword
Double-edged swords are the rule, rather than the exception, it seems and it is in general a monumental communications failure that risks and vulnerabilities are not sufficiently (publicly) acknowledged and appropriately managed. Should technology creators be held responsible for the potential disorder and malfeasance to which their products and technologies are applied? Notwithstanding the economic […]
A game of information, influence and seeded (or targeted) turbulence is unlikely to be winnable (or won) by reproducing and reinforcing the structural, organisational components that merely reproduce and self-validate the axioms, grammars and rules of that game. These games are won by rewriting the rules; by extending an existing grammar and logical framework in […]
Driving tonight, someone took this photo over my shoulder. We had been to the city and I decided to drive past the airport. As we crested a hill we were engulfed in smoke. This was smoke from fires over a hundred kilometers away. The South-East coast of New South Wales has been inundated with bushfires. […]
Categories
Friendly Fire: Politics, Philosophy
The politicians are very similar, in general, to the philosophers; they seek value and utility through finding new ways to divide, to separate, to objectify and to create both distance and difference in the world. This endless definition and referential inflation is of course nothing more than an introduction of more information, more complexity and […]
Daedelus Kite 