How often we choose to live in a happy discomfort with which we have become so intimately accustomed. Even the possibility of freedom from these suffering chains we bear (like precious golden prizes) becomes more frightening than to face the difference of something new or undefined. This is why we so often settle for an […]
Context: How do you build trust in new technologies? An arguably irreducible factor in this is that cultural, linguistic and (corollary) cognitive systems thrive where and when there is a threshold of uncertainty and doubt. Personal (or national) identities – for instance – are never so certain in their dissimulated security as when they are […]
Professor Bell provides a fascinating, artfully-abbreviated and profoundly well-informed historical survey of the steam, electrical, computational and AI/cyber-physical technological phase transitions of human civilisation. As an anthropologist, she grounds technological systems in the people and places that inhabit them. It is clearly of critical importance to consider the lived experience of a future that remakes us and […]
Swimming against the stream and powerful tides of conventional thought and behavioural orthodoxy is the only way to ever do anything of enduring value or significance in life. It is also the hardest life to live. Authenticity and sincerity or conscientious adherence to your own values will cost you more in suffering and hardship than […]
Pandemic metamorphosis is upon us all and among all the darkness and tragedy there will be new life. Patterns of behaviour carry us, much as does language, in many ways much more than we could ever carry, possess or assert control over them and regardless of these fragile egos we are all compelled (as Subjects […]
Some moments are so simple and unproblematically perfect that it is entirely understandable how Ancient peoples may have perceived a world so deeply infused and alive with mystery, magic and meaning. For all our progress and the hyper-extended cognition of complex technology, we have not really come all that far since then and while to […]
“The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.” – L.P. Hartley Indeed, and an accelerating technological – as much as cultural – disassembly of the present moment not only slings us post-haste into an uncertain future, but also (and in equal measure) makes itinerant historical tourists and displaced voyeurs of us all […]
Zeitgeist.
Narrative dissonance is a necessary component of social communication; an autonomous method for introducing the useful information entropy of difference through which biological, cognitive and cultural systems evolve and maintain resilience against catastrophic disassembly. This difference has become acute, amplified by technology and it’s consequences have all but shredded political civility.
Never mind that the sum-total of all available evidence is so profound that the only plausible chance anyone has of not believing that Climate Change is upon us is to either be so naive or so maliciously ignorant that it is impossible to admit this fact into their personal conceptual vocabulary and interpretive framework of […]
While we are able to cultivate semi-autonomous technical solutions that provide insight into material records of communication and – through them – a historical sedimentation of the self-replicating complexities of culture and cognition in information-encoding logic (as language), we seem a little less able to apply those same technical solutions to untangle the challenges represented […]
Entrenched resistance to mature and well-informed organisational metamorphosis and (useful) new ideas is simultaneously: a concise characterisation of (the) fear of novelty, difference and change; the essential pattern and shape of (pretty much every historical instance of) organisational, political and ideological pathology; a reflection of core psychological symmetries and reflexive boundaries through which self- (or […]
