Context: ‘This is not science fiction,’ say scientists pushing for ‘neuro-rights’ Dystopian authoritarian visions notwithstanding, there is a strong philosophical argument to be made that consciousness, sentience or intelligence only possesses the value (and, indeed, the substantive reality) it does because there are aspects of self and indeed of complex systems self-organisation that are not […]
Partial assertions of self-control are foundational in personality formation but where they find themselves amplified at scale into authoritarian pathologies we witness the birth of profoundly insecure, uncontrollable beasts upon and in which no truly happy life might ever be cultivated.
Context: Oakland, Portland sue over use of federal agents at protests A generally irreducible property of pathological ideologies, context and partisan-agnostic – in as much as any assertion can ever now be, is that they work industriously (and just as often unconsciously) towards the recreation of the circumstances that validate their insecurity and the actions […]
As an observer of media and communications systems in regards to oversight, constraint and psychological, cultural or ideological aspirations to control and manipulate, there is a curious enigma and blind-spot in all attempts to surveillance as a method of control. That is, specifically, that asserting prohibition and censorship is only ever superficially able to provide […]
Context: The CCP’s Official Journal Falls in Line with Xi Jinping’s Cult of Personality As a more general philosophical observation agnostic of specific contexts (including -isms or persons), human beings are subject to reflexive psychological imprinting of a sort that leads us to cultivate these fantasies and fictions of triumphant great leaders as an inadvertent […]
I am endlessly fascinated by the many ways that these systems of knowledge and information or culture and political momentum tend towards similar, recurring self-organisational and behavioural patterns. Much is (rightly) made of a contemporary, pronounced turn towards populism and authoritarianism. A suggestion for interpretation which does not seek to directly engage any specific instance […]
Which begs the question: if individuals tend on average towards a path of least resistance and select (or become selected by) a singular – or authoritarian – narrative interpretation and filter of their world, why is it that these systems in which there is no (or at least a sudden vacuum of) overarching meta-narrative find […]
Context: Strong Yet Brittle: The Risks of Digital Authoritarianism There are quite probable logical and (by extension, mathematical and) distributed material or socioeconomic, not to mention strategic, senses in which a strict adherence to unwavering and inflexible closure and continuity must necessarily create the conditions of inevitable, eventual and/or accelerated structural disassembly or decline. A […]
At the 75th anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy, it is a good time to reflect upon where we are all going as a civilisation and what we might plausibly achieve to inhibit, interdict or halt the possibility of any similar global catastrophes from ever occurring again.
A characteristically long and wordy waffle on the topic of human intelligence, the cognitive hyper-extension of technology, an iterative fracture of grand narrative into abbreviated artefacts, unconscious biases and a Global turn towards authoritarianism.
The endless stoking of the fires of difference might do little over a longer term to benefit the ideological and political voices and positions of liberalism and humanism.
The actual rate of accelerating technological and organisational complexity has been outpacing administrative and hierarchical aptitude for some time.
Daedelus Kite 