Wittgenstein once opined that “philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.” I am starting to wonder if cybernetics might not be a battle against the seduction of our minds by technology. The transmission medium and feedback mechanisms of language and technology become the primary methods of influence as […]
Successfully negotiating the resonant dissonance of any democracy is indeed deeply problematised by an obligation to successfully define, negotiate and evolve strategies with which to do so. I see the contemporary American problem as being on one hand unique and specific to a particular entanglement of histories, motivations, incentives and value (or belief) systems but […]
The suspension of disbelief is a concept that illustrates a kind of game we play against, with and as our selves. The twist in this tale is that we seek to mask (as though by self-hypnosis) the unreality of a world that only becomes real as a function of the extent to which we become […]
Technological metamorphosis tends by variously unacknowledged or linguistically and cognitively impermeable mechanisms to reproduce precisely the correct kind of uncertainty and communication or media system turbulence to assure the continuing tenure of those technologies and their logical descendants. It is reproduction, however, possessing an emergent variation sufficient to breed resilience as unscripted existential assurance.
Language and (other) communications technologies are built around and positively amplify the signals of difference by and through which human beings define, understand and share or record their experience of the world. The abbreviated macrostates of variously competitive self-definitions emerge and converge in ways that recursively drive the adaptive self-propagation of the communication systems and technologies that embody their primary transmission […]
Oh yes contingent dependency, and yet value and assurance are always, if inadvertently, in some way grounded in risk and insecurity. Contentious, perhaps, but we shouldn’t need too many examples to validate the intuition. Interesting how the solution seems to be framed in terms of “more technology” which hardly takes account of endemic or axiomatic […]
It strikes me as fascinating that the most significant things we ever experience in our lives are quite impossible to describe with language. Emotional life and other experiences occur at a level prior to language or ordered cognition. When we try to explain it, all we ever do is see our own descriptions reflected back […]
Context: Solar storm on Thursday expected to make Northern Lights visible in 17 states These events are nothing if not a reminder of the diminutive transience of our own lives and (all of) our aspirations, agendas, affiliations and vanities. In Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the character Zaphod Beeblebrox enters a machine called […]
I spend a lot of time considering abstract, complex and the many aspirationally “real” systems that exist between our ears and upon the surface of our planet. My acquired suspicion in this context is that neither “growth” nor “degrowth” represent sufficiently sophisticated concepts with which to effectively engage this vast and multidimensional problem we are […]
Generative AI is itself an amplification from and product of the kinds of dissonant #entropy that actors engaged in “hack and deceive” are seeking to leverage, even if only transiently or in passing as a function of larger #competitive systems. Advanced Persistent Trolls are themselves likely a temporary #communications systems coefficient, in the longer run. Automation at scale will accelerate far […]
An electronics project I built in 2022. It reacted to audio input (i.e. noise, voices) and changed the patterned system of light in a continuous feedback loop with its environment. Each face is an identical irregular triangle but the resulting dodecahedral geometry is such that all edges are the fulcrums as bilateral axes of a […]
It may not always be obvious but the uncertainties, ambiguities and outright inconsistencies that inhabit our forms of communication are as important as any intention or purposive orientation. The constellations of intent and wilful self-determination that inhabit and haunt our systems of communication tend to generate as much diffusion and confusion as they do coherent […]
