Categories
technology

Is China Taking the Lead in AI?

Context: Is China Taking the Lead in AI? I guess it really depends on what we consider progress to be and in what ways such progress is substantive and meaningful or superficial and fragile. It may be an undeniable fact that competition and adversarial sabre-rattling is as profoundly and normatively written into our modern psyches […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Spinning Democracy: Capitol Insurrection

Context: China, Russia, Iran Spin Capitol Insurrection A note on geopolitical spin: very much like quantum entangled pairs, it exists in a superposition of states – measurement along a particular axis produces the reality. Most instances of perceived weakness can as easily infer strength – it just depends upon which axes of measurement (and narrative) […]

Categories
culture

Cultural Life is Unity through Difference

Cultural life is a beautiful thing. In many ways it represents the hidden bonding unity of a people or a place. Always be wary of anyone who attempts to crush or erase cultural difference – the living thread and flow of human history is because of any fear of difference or Otherness, it is what […]

Categories
environment

Policy trumps biodiversity, again.

On discovering that the Government of my country is putting policy (and thus ideology) before environment and refusing to sign a leader’s pledge on biodiversity: Australia joins US, China and Russia in refusing to sign leaders’ pledge on biodiversity  The sophistication required here is at a level of complexity that almost entirely invalidates existing (institutional) […]

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
Philosophy

No One Knows China

Context: Nobody Knows Anything About China It is of the nature of a science or an art of existential introspection (not to mention institutional knowledge) to seek the least-incorrect and lowest-energy, succinct model of an Object or Entity. The curiously mischievous enigma of such a psychologically-reflexive aspiration towards ordered pattern as #truth or fact – […]

Categories
politics

Coronavirus Inquiry Stand-off

Context: Coronavirus inquiry tensions leave WA farmers fearing more China tariffs after barley hit Nothing quite invokes trust as does authentic accountability and undifferentiated transparency. Questions as to the Global or regional presence or absence of such transparency are as fractious as they are important. The international society of states (such as it is) currently finds itself […]

Categories
politics

Dodgy Documents and Meta-Political Observations on Coronavirus Attribution

Context: Busted: Pentagon Contractors’ Report on ‘Wuhan Lab’ Origins of Virus Is Bogus I would usually just slide past this kind of topic without commenting. However, as an artefact in a vigorously-contested information environment – an observation to be made here is that even a document of dubious veracity serves a useful purpose above and […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Coronavirus, Dr. Li Wenliang and the Implicit Fragility of Authoritarian Political Regimes

While it is true that there is no such thing as a perfect political system, some forms of social organisation clearly possess greater resilience than others. This current epidemiological catastrophe is clear evidence of the implicit failures of authoritarian information control. A Chinese couple is being detained and transported to unknown destination inside a large […]

Categories
technology

Active Measures: information, physics, influence and censorship in cyberspace

It is interesting that active intervention, interdiction and an assertion of ideological self-interest through campaigns of enthusiastic (technologically-facilitated) censorship are probably the most expensive and least efficient ways of achieving information-centric goals. It is like attempting to cool a building by adding cold air – far more expensive in terms of energy, resources and information-processing […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Premonition of Civil War

The underlying momentum of evolving material logics, symmetries and information systems seem already oriented towards incurring dissonance, difference and entropy as an autonomous method through which their own accelerated logical metamorphosis self-propagates.

Categories
culture

Idioms of Absence

An epigenetic self-replication of the spiritual void, manifest as cultural entities in the contemporary Chinese art of Mi Qiaoming.