Climate Change is accelerating. Human organisational systems are already quite fragile (as an inverse yet direct measure of psychological, cultural and political immaturity) and will find themselves bearing the burden of an entropy they are poorly-prepared to negotiate. Expect dramatic and sometimes spontaneously self-organising conflicts, turbulence and political upheavals which will sweep away millions of […]
You would think that any self-respecting species possessing intellectual and technological aptitude sufficient to fathom the deepest mysteries of the Cosmos might also be able to avoid its own imminent catastrophic dissolution and descent into conflict, environmental disassembly, geopolitical dissonance and self-destruction. Not, as it turns out, this distributed material and symbolic human being within […]
Context: Why do we ignore catastrophic risk? It may just be that some entities, artefacts, events or (other) possibilities are so vast and so horrifying that they all but entirely invalidate the limited linguistic or cognitive referential frame(s) of this comforting little semiotic cocoon of complex tautologies and half-mirrored surfaces within which we (all) live. […]
Context: The climate change clues hidden in art history The endemic representational ambiguity of art is an inevitable source of doubt in regards to veracity in a context of deriving Climate facts through the artefacts of Art History. A useful comparison of contemporary artistic reflections of environment and climate must always – and perhaps necessarily […]
Beyond the self-evident inadequacies of our integrated bureaucratic hierarchies, the labyrinth of systemic biases which have funneled wealth into corporate welfare and monopolistic hegemonies are now revealing their utter ineptitude at providing adequate socioeconomic resilience. You could ask why no one saw this coming. Many people did, they just did not know what shape or […]
The more we reflexively structure, cultivate and sediment our cultural identities, psychological subjectivity and civilisation around (and through) a limiting grammar and vocabulary of runaway greed, the more we find ourselves trapped in a spiral of accelerating entropy. Context: Thomas Keneally’s 2020s vision: We must abandon the language of the market to reclaim our humanity
Zen is to utterly deconstruct, disassemble and reconceptualise Self and Mind. It is difficult medicine but the mischievous enigma at the core of all of our problems is our Self. Decentralised psychological subjectivity and cultural presence is one in which adversarial competition is dissolved as there is no foundational differentiation between persons, property or places. […]
We rarely perceive that each action, experience and event is always in some way a microcosm, deeply entangled with (and symptomatic of) a much broader and more complex world. In each notionally separate event, entity or artefact we might seek to discover a Global truth hidden, encrypted, but still standing there in plain sight.
It may be a matter of social and psychological necessity that this kind of monumental existential threat – to which we have perhaps long been desensitised by repetition and the droning monotony of unnecessarily adversarial ideological and political competition – carry more impact, more information entropy and cultural gravity when they become a tangible, material, […]
We woke up today to the world’s worst air quality in Australia’s capital, Canberra. I am still waiting for political leadership on the topic of Climate Change but expecting instead: more dismissive parochialism and institutionalised, ideological denialism and avoidance. Context: Canberra’s air quality is ‘the worst in the world’ as bushfire smoke shrouds capital
Driving tonight, someone took this photo over my shoulder. We had been to the city and I decided to drive past the airport. As we crested a hill we were engulfed in smoke. This was smoke from fires over a hundred kilometers away. The South-East coast of New South Wales has been inundated with bushfires. […]
Every day, in the afternoon or early evening, for around 4 weeks a blanket of smoke has drifted across my city. I reflected on this here recently but tonight I found myself inadvertently caught up in the smoke as I was walking. My eyes are stinging, I have a sickening burnt wood taste in the […]
