Signs (like words, information, communication systems and the dependent subjectivities that so vigorously self-propagate through them) are intrinsically meaningless. Meaning and value are relational properties of communication systems such that complex dependencies render isolated nodes (or words, even persons) with a subtle kind of productive futility. Not so problematic from the interior referential perspective of […]
The uncanny frequency with which narcissists percolate into positions of power is a function of the ways that the Rube Goldberg tesseract of ascendant organisational ecologies acquire an emergent orientation towards the self-selection of complementary, resonant character types. This is to say: there exists something of a distributed pathological bias for self-selecting personality traits that […]
Trauma always begets more trauma and war is a wildfire that no one can control.
Curiouser and curiouser. When we map a living thing upon or within itself and in or through its own cognitive and representational hyper-extension of technological mediation, we find our minds engaging this all as an aspiration towards closure and control yet forever fall short of attaining that goal. We can not completely model or map […]
In many ways, these complex tragedies self-replicate through the trauma they invoke. It’s something that is so characteristically human that we often don’t perceive it. The systems of psychology, culture and communication that we (all) inhabit are quite naturally and autonomously oriented towards their own recursive self-propagation. A primary method of this replication has historically […]
Raise the stakes, escalate, brutalise and threaten war but never, ever actually start a full-scale unrestrained conflict. Nothing so certainly disassembles dictatorial regimes as a blind leap into armed conflict and imperialist aggression. Sure, none of us will ever miss any of these unrepentant misanthropes but how few of them ever learn from the historical […]
Would you have preferred to have had rich parents? It should matter to you that wealth is not conjured miraculously from nothing and that the cost might not always be obvious but it is always there. Poverty only exists because wealth does.
(My own) unnecessarily grandiose and/or unsubstantiated generalisations notwithstanding, the effervescing efflorescence of meaningless communications system noise is a core function and mechanism of sociotechnical self-regulation at the “global”, Gestalt or planetary civilisation scale. An ocean of entropy and dissipative recombinatorial turbulence self-validates the organisational teleologies, such as they are, that already exist. The primary mechanism […]
The critical role of local clocks in the emergence of complex systems is often misunderstood. It is at the level of harmonic resonance and entangled epistemological (as much as material) interdependence that system valence begins to refine cadence, prosody and the overall synchronisation of interacting (i.e. communicating) system clocks. It may not be immediately apparent […]
Meaning is a distributed, relational property in both language and technology. The essence of a word, a technology or a person is rarely if ever entirely self-contained but acquires significance as a function of where it exists in regards to all other instances of the same (or similar) kinds of thing. A technology is never […]
Context: New Biosensors Allow Earbuds To Record Brain Activity and Exercise Levels This is all moving inexorably towards and through a world in which omnipresent interfaces to human bodies (and brains) so seamlessly merge surveillance and digital entertainment as information encoding, decoding and transmission, that not only does the functional dichotomy of “for me” and […]
Cognition in some sense exists as a function of the abstract decomposability of the world but finds itself forever problematised and fractured by an unresolvable epistemological enigma. Mind (and brain) has to be divided against itself to persist as this provides the foundational symmetry as gradient of difference through which it can adapt, learn and […]
