The image of vapour trails and diffusion captures more than transience; it maps the way systems unravel under pressure. Passing through might once have seemed neutral, a fact of existence, but it has been bent into something harsher. Entropy, which in physics names the statistical drift of order into disorder, is here mobilised by greed, […]
When people speak about language, they often imagine that meaning sits inside words like a substance carried in a vessel. If only we could replace “false” words with “true” ones, communication would repair itself. The history of both linguistics and information theory shows something else: semantics does not precede use. It follows frequency. From signals […]
Ideas, if not analyses, are never truly or singularly of an individual. There is something of a distributed communications “field” and what is conceptually or technically intelligible, useful or valuable is adaptively filtered and percolates through it. The value of a good (or great) idea is amplified by the presence and persistence of less-than-stellar ideas […]
Context: World Politics at the Edge of Chaos: Reflections on Complexity and Global Life I have been deep down a rabbit hole of seeking to apply these complexity thinking insights more broadly for the last few years. One key, kernel and core takeaway is that (we) human beings seem on the whole quite poorly equipped […]
Great graphic (from the people at Information is Beautiful) but it immediately raises a question of just how we measure severity, extent and consequence in this context. Is there an offset and identifiable boundary between naive analysis that concentrates on common as relatively unproblematic or pragmatic metrics and more detailed (yet broader spectrum) analysis that […]
The persistent value in literature such as Eric Blair‘s seems, to me, to be substantively – if counter-intuitively – abstracted from the political filter through which it may (or may not) be interpreted. While we seem collectively unable (or unwilling) – and much to my own chagrin – to just “get beyond” and “get over” […]
In what ways does regulation, interdiction, surveillance and retrospective analysis or definition actually and inadvertently (re)produce the problems it seeks to diminish? Distinctions between legal and illegal are clearly and self-evidently important but in terms of comprehensive analysis and aspirations towards effective problem resolution they may also be a foundational misdirection. It is becoming clear […]
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. […]
The extent to which we are all merely self-propagating soliton-like saliences in a rippling probabilistic field of information and energy remains largely unexplored but fertile for investigation.
“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” -J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship […]
Multidimensional heuristics are those forms of analysis that, rather than attempting a cumulative or brute force aggregation and hard interpretation of data, seek recursive logical insight through intuitive reconfiguration and subtractive recombination of existing patterns. It is true that our minds and acquired or entrained cognitive methods, as much as the procedural artefacts and coded […]
The strangest thing about all of our systems of governance, control and social maintenance is that it is in the very act(s) of attempting to create order that we must necessarily also generate disorder. The more components, moving parts and abstract logical relationships we introduce into the world, the more degrees of autonomous systemic and […]
Daedelus Kite 