Technologically-mediated communication is creating the global epidemic of loneliness. Alienation and emptiness is a signal amplified by our ubiquitous and omnipresent sense and experience of contemporary connectivity, an inward-turning inflection of systemic extensibility for which we are quite poorly prepared by the majority of our evolutionary history. Kindness fades in these moments as everyone struggles […]
There’s an argument to be made for the notion that the contents of our minds are really nothing more than the reflective internalisation of all that froth and bubble we experience from other people. In such a world in which the contents of each mind are little more that the reverberating reflection of all the […]
There are some failing metaphysical assumptions and troubled subjectivities in the notionally “Western” position and its attendant parochialisms. A drift through deterministic materialism and downstream mechanical (or algorithmic) thinking into untenable philosophical positions also seems somewhat inevitable, if perhaps not entirely irremediable. I am constantly fascinated (and yet to be quite honest also simultaneously horrified) […]
A fine example of the many ways that uniquely high intelligence is antithetical to the worlds we inhabit. Those forms of intellect and problem-solving that percolate to ascendance are generally those that directly (or indirectly) replicate the axioms, assumptions and self-validating value (as belief) systems that already exist. In this way, the world reproduces the […]
I believe it was Paul Verlaine who once opined that “l’application c’est le plupart de l’intelligence” but without struggle, without the broken, breaking symmetries and dissociative, alienating furnace of experience and entropy, nothing is learned, nothing is gained and intelligence (as much as life) uselessly dissipates into all oblivion and forgetting. What, then, to say […]
I have seen what trauma does. It can take good people and bend them backwards against their will, leading into all manner of despair and hardship. I have seen the ways that people self-define through the things they know and the suffering that has shaped them. I have witnessed as their lonely lives lead them […]
It’s quite unpalatable but is also true that for the overwhelming majority of us, access to the means of digital self-expression remains inversely proportional to either our reach or effect upon others and the world at large. Subsequently, almost all of our heartfelt longings, witty aphorisms or philosophical insights and literary anecdotes are bound to […]
Individuality is really a kind of unacknowledged emotional isolation for which by reflex we cultivate more self-definition as a cure, but only ever generate further discomfort and alienation. In this way, personal subjectivity and individuated psychological experience come to unwittingly depend for emotional security upon precisely the referential distance and difference (of aspirational uniqueness) that […]
I’m a disavowed “swipe left” in this world of manifest superficiality and instantaneous digital gratification; not much interested in the narcissistic hedonism of commercially-mediated myopia and all these profoundly narrow behavioural games and shallow conceptual vocabularies, I really am completely out of place here. Nevermind that all we ever do by embracing and chasing all […]
Depression is such a fickle thing. Some days everything seems fine, you build yourself up and seem so full of joy and purpose and then one look, one word or callous gesture just brings it all crashing back down. The seduction of emotional isolation, alienation and catastrophic disengagement with the world is at these times […]
There are many kinds of fear. Some of them are straightforward, unproblematic and represent a simple correlation between a concept and the thing it represents. In this sense a fear of a specific animal is usually just that and regardless that arachnophobia, for instance, rarely represents something unconscious or indirect other than a linearly-related fear […]
Science and technology cartwheel and careen past us in ways that few can convincingly argue are fully comprehended, defined or ever anything more than superficially controlled. This accelerating turbulence of complex sociotechnical recursion and self-validating necessity is a self-propagating compression wave of information, energy, technology and concepts. It ripples and oscillates like waves on a […]
Daedelus Kite 