Categories
communication

Story, Game, Complexity

Notice: this hybrid constellation of symbols, narratives, and competitive idioms is the central band and “strange attractor” of a probability distribution we might otherwise recognise or identify under some definition of entropy. In a complex system, the paths that emerge and persist are those that reproduce and sustain their environmental containers, contexts, and communication systems. […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Semiotic

There are strange attractors in the high-dimensional possibility spaces that exist all around us. Our evolutionary inheritance and over-saturated attention dissociates us from it. Idioms and cliches are the central bank of a probability distribution. The simplest theatrical narratives and conceptual, behavioural vocabularies as compression. A battery and mirror for experience and decompressive enculturation. Information […]

Categories
art

Signification Supersedes Semantics

Signification supersedes the semantics it claims as its own. The accuracy of a representation is subordinate to the act of representing. This is also how compression functions in cultural systems: it abbreviates by cross-reference, by the innvocation of possibility. The methods of system self-replication become more important than the discrete snapshots and timeslices with which […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Censors and Actuators

A totalising political mindset becomes about as self-imprisoned by censorship as it is ever emboldened by it. If it were an unambiguously measurable property, I’d say the damage inflicted upon a nation’s prosperity and sustainable continuity is directly proportional to its self-isolation.

Categories
Philosophy

ATP

Ageing is our embodied experience of entropy. In itself, it is neither good nor bad – it just is. The countless ways that things decay or almost wilfully disassemble – they tend on average to be costly and unpleasant experiences but there is a flip side to the story. This darker anomaly and compound mystery […]

Categories
Philosophy

Autocratic Bitcoin?

Context: More Dangerous’ Than Nukes—China And Russia Revealed To Be Suddenly Abandoning The U.S. Dollar For A Bitcoin, Ethereum And XRP-Inspired Rival Amid Crypto Price Pump. A cunning plan. I’m going to suggest that self-inflicted existential desperation makes strange bedfellows of technologies and autocrats. The strangest of all being the expected benefits of socioeconomic, cultural […]

Categories
Philosophy

Death, Life and other Symbols

I wonder about what we lose when we die. While the cultural transmission medium and distributed super-organism of embodied human being is as dependent upon transient existence and experience as it is upon the literal apoptosis of imminent dissolution, none of this renders mortality in any sense intelligible from within the mixed salad of words […]

Categories
technology

AI Gold Rush

A literal gold rush moment, but let’s not kid ourselves about the good, the bad and the ugly of it all. The cadence is already beyond effective management: everyone is constantly playing catch up, and – if you read between the lines, this uncertainty is the kernel core of the value and utility of an […]

Categories
communication

AI Ethics, Alignment, Responsibility, Strategy

Responsibility is significant. Aligned factors: the most disruptive feature of new technology is counter-intuitively NOT (or at least not only) the novel artefact, entity or system. It is the literally self-sustaining(!) discontinuity by and through which existing and persisting organisational or communications systems defensively lash themselves to the mast of strategic and communicative anachronisms. They […]

Categories
technology

Existential Discontinuity and Information Vulnerability

Information vulnerability is an implicit, endemic and irreducible cost of communications technology. It doesn’t really matter which instances and risks are in ascendance at any particular moment, as consequential and complex as they may ultimately be, because the underlying fact remains that there is no information security “safe harbour” and every action taken, every assertion […]

Categories
Philosophy

Negation

Endemic epistemological blindspots are interesting. Systems of belief are always at some level self-referential tautologies. The one thing that they can never unproblematically represent is themselves. Consequently – models are inviolably incomplete but this is not a system bug, it is an indefinitely extensible introspective feature. It’s also an early waypoint in the journey of […]

Categories
Philosophy

Existential Pragmatics and Emergence

There are, in general, two main ways to understand a complex system-of-systems. First, as an adaptive constellation of modularly decomposable artefacts, entities and sub-systems as subject to and expressions of orchestration and directed purpose – that is, in terms of its differentiated parts and their relationships. Later, as a bonded, binding proxy organism in which […]