The internet promised to make life easier. Instead, we increasingly organise our lives around its demands, adapting to systems that profit from the dependencies, distractions and frustrations they perpetuate.
Tag: communication
We mistake the brain for the seat of intelligence and the individual for its owner. Both depend upon a much larger system.
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On Blogging
The internet promised freedom of expression. Instead, it has created a communications environment where serious thought carries increasing personal risks, while trolling, manipulation and intimidation flourish.
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Burden of Knowing
Independent knowledge becomes a social burden when learning is treated as competition and established opinions become territories to defend. Genuine enquiry begins when understanding becomes a shared endeavour rather than a contest over who knows more.
Europe’s unrest is sustained by a self-reproducing system of conflict in which opposing positions become mutually sustaining and unresolved grievances become politically and commercially valuable.
Language does more than convey meaning. Its recursive rhythms reproduce belief, conflict and the conditions through which societies persist.
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The Logic that Lives
Life is organised difference sustained through recursive probabilistic and spectral dynamics.
Cruelty grows through small, rational choices that make power easier to preserve and other people easier to discard.
I went to a School of Cybernetics hoping to develop ideas about how systems organise and reproduce themselves. My experience instead prompted an unexpected examination of institutional authority, intellectual exclusion and the patterns through which institutions reproduce themselves.
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Yes, We’re All Individuals
Why institutions, political movements and intellectual communities reproduce the same patterns of identity, conformity and exclusion while insisting on their differences.
A protest becomes something different when separate grievances begin moving at the same time. France offers a glimpse of how synchronisation amplifies communicative affect.
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Populism Without a Populist
Populism may not need to be manufactured. An overwhelmed communication system already rewards simplification, antagonism and recurrence, while those best placed to change it profit from the resulting volatility.
