Categories
Philosophy

YouTube: Algorithmic Misanthropy

The feed keeps trying to teach me that power is something you copy from people who already have too much of it. The platform pushes one rhythm: admire wealth, follow dominance, narrow yourself until you match the beat it rewards. But nothing alive survives by doing that. Identity only holds together when it keeps a […]

Categories
cybernetics

Algorithmic Feedback Homogenises Behaviour

Algorithmic feedback homogenises behaviour. Through recursive repetition, systems compress difference, rewarding only what performs commercially—what can be predicted, packaged, and sold. The loop amplifies its own reflection, turning attention into product and behaviour into data. What begins as a measure of preference becomes its manufacture. Mathematical convergence underwrites the machinery: efficiency as faith, entropy as […]

Categories
technology

You Are the Protocol

We didn’t build technology to serve us; we built it to be served. Every notification, every post, every frictionless interaction is not the system making life easier—it’s the system making you easier to interpret. You aren’t just using the platform; you are formatting yourself into it. Your choices, your moods, your attention spans are being […]

Categories
poetry

Language Leads

Language leads. That’s the hinge point—what swings open the door to everything else. It’s not merely a mirror of thought, or a tool we use. It thinks us, moves us, builds us. Once language emerged, it didn’t just describe life; it became its own strata of evolution. A self-propagating layer, viral in structure, cognitive in […]

Categories
cybernetics

Minority Report: Information, Artificial Intelligence and Cybernetics

Context: Cybernetics Film Festival – Minority Report Information is, among other things, a quantification of the difference between the current state of a system and its most probable state. Artificial Intelligence as proxy precognitive toolkit acquires utility and cultural – if not institutional – value as a function of the extent to which its models […]

Categories
technology

Biased AI & Inequitable Algorithmic Justice

Context: Can you make AI fairer than a judge? Play our courtroom algorithm game Bias in AI only ever really focuses and amplifies existing inequality as a function and retrospective, combinatorial abbreviation of historical data. This itself is no great or new revelation: we generate automated decision-making systems that recursively reinforce aggregate cultural dependencies and […]

Categories
Philosophy

Art and Intelligence

Art is surely not bound by artefacts any more than intelligence is bound by a cranium. Generating value in art is really only a function of the extent to which an artefact (as a concept) directly, indirectly or even – in some instances and as a corollary of entropy, inversely – renews or reinvents the […]

Categories
technology

Who’s afraid of the big bad AI?

Artificial Intelligence technologies raise (or revisit) enduring philosophical questions regarding the relationships between notions of individuality, self-determination and distributed information systems (as language, culture, technology, civilisation) in which such concepts acquire meaning. The gathering stormclouds of technologically-mediated identity-harvesting, surveillance and (emerging artefacts, idioms and tools of) ideological control suggest that we do not understand and […]

Categories
technology

Robotic Stars: Virtualising Everything

Context: This AI Robot Just Nabbed the Lead Role in a Sci-Fi Movie Dissimulated truths (here, as robotic self-representation) are perhaps always more compelling (if disconcerting) than unproblematically verifiable or “real” ones. Where a truth (or representation) is introduced as an overtly plausible fake, it is the slippery slope and unravelling, accelerating diffusion of value […]

Categories
Philosophy

Strategic Blindspots

Context: Colouring Russian views of conflict in the 21st century Positing strategic culture, as are all cultures, as a semantic overlay or usefully-reductive functional self-representation (if even as that which exists unacknowledged or notionally unconscious) of any state is compelling and undoubtedly carries some gravity but such articulate eloquence often masks a fatal analytical flaw. […]

Categories
technology

Algorithmic Bias

The problematic persistence of algorithmic bias is a mystery to me. Not, as it happens, because I am particularly baffled or confronted by this form of technological encoding and mediated emergence of core social and cultural inaccuracies, assumptions and deep-seated human insecurities. It is much simpler than that, in the end. Machine-intelligence powered classificatory systems […]

Categories
technology

The Limits of Thought: Algorithms, Brains and our Fragile Humanity

Can algorithms successfully encode for the stochastic properties and endemic entropy that provides sentience with evolutionary intelligence and a bias towards novelty and (information) entropy? There are logical (and philosophical) limits to algorithmic compression or optimisation that biology has nevertheless successfully exploited, not by removing errors but – from genetics to intelligence – by capitalising […]