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…
Flying Kites
Returning to a particularly poorly-kept secret of our shared lives: no one actually knows what they are doing and everyone is improvising, making it up as they go along. We are born into a world of pre-existing stories, traditions and symbols which envelops us like a tidal wave and security blanket of meaning, identity and…
An Organisational Uncanny Valley
The entities and artefacts we make "in our own image" include the abstractions and patterns through which we understand and organise the world and ourselves.
The Creativity of Cultural Erasure
Every act of creativity and recombinatory cultural reconfiguration is both additive and subtractive - it is an addition of complexity and structure and is simultaneously the systemic logical negation of existing methods and strategies of organisation and thought.
Generational Melancholy
Every generation reinvents ennui.
Encoding Culture
A logic of communication is stored in material artefacts and its expression and distributed embodiment in culture evolves over time.
Counter-culture as Useful Entropy
The dissonance of difference serves useful purposes for the continuity of cultural sytems.
Utopia, Dystopia and Technological Forecasting
As the frequency of technological change accelerates, the amplitude and range of uncertainty is concurrently amplified.
Accelerating Frames of History
The moving frame, having moved, drags itself ever onwards...
Culture: Gothic Complexity
The primary purpose of cultural systems, sub-systems and sub- or counter-cultures is also their primary method. That is (and fundamentally): the replication of the process of self-replication.
Inflection
Cultural and technological change and progress is an acceleration measured relative to its own process...
On Losing Control
Control may be necessary at a personal and social level but is for all that no less a convenient fiction and a contingent, transient illusion than is self...
