Categories
Alien Anthropology

Lying Flat

Context: Work is a False Idol Note: A newspaper article regarding the endemic failure of capitalism in China that is itself pay-walled and inaccessible seems suitably ironic as to leave hyper-linked here. It is interesting that this “movement” of self-propagating behavioural and information idioms or tropes might be rendered or interpreted as threatening to economic […]

Categories
Philosophy

Competitive Difference is the Optimal State of Complex Socioeconomic Systems

Context: https://youtu.be/2Uj1A9AguFs Vertical motion in this chart is a measure of the degree to which any of the organisations or entities recursively and reflexively facilitates global information system self-replication. This is precisely how complex information-processing systems function: they autonomously self-select for those components, entities and sub-systems that optimally bias for the replication of the overall […]

Categories
business Organisation Philosophy

Recursive Utility: On Learning to Learn and the Emergence of Mercenary Capitalism

Agreed, on learning to learn. Recursive utility. On the (later) observations of the benefits to that learning process of competitive socioeconomic systems, as mentioned, I partially agree. A degree of competition is healthy but, invoking a general principle of recursive utility again, when competitive adversarialism becomes a goal and an end in itself – as […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Populism, Authoritarianism and Cults of Personality

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 […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

American Decline

American capitalism is an evolving information and energy-processing (i.e. computational) system and complex socioeconomic metabolism that possesses implicit spatial, temporal and material limits. Where boundaries are eventually encountered, the reflexive impulse is for any such system so foundationally grounded upon assumptions of the heroic values implicit to (a) consumptive necessity to begin, slowly – at […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Was Capitalism Inevitable?

An interesting question is as to the inevitability of capitalism – or something very much like it – in any hyper-inflating socioeconomic (and by extension, geopolitical) referential space. That is to say: are there senses in which the natural bias towards autonomously self-optimising information and energy-processing systems – as manifest through and as human civilisation(s) […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Planetary Civilisation: Balancing the Books of Sustainable Growth

Core questions of sustainable civilisation are surely not whether or not growth should occur, but rather – what form or shape that growth should take.  Growth characterised purely as material multiplicity and external, organisational or (associated) thermal or energy burden (also) entirely misses the mark of understanding and harnessing the logically self-inflected nature of innovation […]

Categories
culture

Economics, Psychology, Philosophy and our Shared Selves

There is a certain childish wish-fulfilment in many ideological, economic and political descriptions (and their associated, self-inflected, experience) of reality. This is a simplicity sought in an order and a taxonomy or categorical differentiation, difference and the abstract “distance” of Other(ing) which seeks to impose structure where there rarely is any. Or at least there […]

Categories
systems

Octopus Farming: What is the (actual) product here?

Work into refining the viability of octopus farming continues apace. I doubt that there is any other animal on Earth the farming of which would so closely resemble the cultivation of extraterrestrial life. Reflections on a big(ger) picture: In what ways does accelerated aquaculture only continue to generate the problems which have led to the […]