Categories
Philosophy

Crowdstrike

We have been building a global communications network and irreversible technological dependency on foundationally insecure technologies. It’s not wilfully stupid or cynically opportunistic entrepreneurialism, the logic itself is working as much against as for us. A big shout-out to sleep-deprived system support and cybersecurity teams everywhere. Not a good day to be working on an […]

Categories
cybernetics

Generative Monoculture

What, exactly, does excruciatingly monocultural generative content tell us? While satire and parody acquire significance as a function of their grounding in the consensus reality of whichever time and place they reflect, and given that sum combinatorial complexity of interdependent cultural systems is incommensurable with any bounding measures or methods and “intelligent” machines we currently […]

Categories
cybernetics

Tautological System Dynamics

I wonder if we should be more concerned that fake news (as mis- and disinformation) exists, or that reality is so easily decoupled from our descriptions of it. It says quite a lot about the tautological dynamics of communication systems (of belief) that they are generally and only ever referentially anchored upon themselves.

Categories
Philosophy

Imperfect Communication

Meaning is contested but not because we explicitly or necessarily choose this particular path. If meaning and cultural or political and psychological significance was not subject to ambiguity and confusion, deception and misdirection in the ways it generally is, the adaptive system of bartered value and utility we build around and as language would be […]

Categories
communication

Story, Game, Complexity

Notice: this hybrid constellation of symbols, narratives, and competitive idioms is the central band and “strange attractor” of a probability distribution we might otherwise recognise or identify under some definition of entropy. In a complex system, the paths that emerge and persist are those that reproduce and sustain their environmental containers, contexts, and communication systems. […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Semiotic

There are strange attractors in the high-dimensional possibility spaces that exist all around us. Our evolutionary inheritance and over-saturated attention dissociates us from it. Idioms and cliches are the central bank of a probability distribution. The simplest theatrical narratives and conceptual, behavioural vocabularies as compression. A battery and mirror for experience and decompressive enculturation. Information […]

Categories
art

Signification Supersedes Semantics

Signification supersedes the semantics it claims as its own. The accuracy of a representation is subordinate to the act of representing. This is also how compression functions in cultural systems: it abbreviates by cross-reference, by the innvocation of possibility. The methods of system self-replication become more important than the discrete snapshots and timeslices with which […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Censors and Actuators

A totalising political mindset becomes about as self-imprisoned by censorship as it is ever emboldened by it. If it were an unambiguously measurable property, I’d say the damage inflicted upon a nation’s prosperity and sustainable continuity is directly proportional to its self-isolation.

Categories
technology

Existential Discontinuity and Information Vulnerability

Information vulnerability is an implicit, endemic and irreducible cost of communications technology. It doesn’t really matter which instances and risks are in ascendance at any particular moment, as consequential and complex as they may ultimately be, because the underlying fact remains that there is no information security “safe harbour” and every action taken, every assertion […]

Categories
Philosophy

DALL-E can’t spell well

I am coming to believe that these shady generative AI spelling misadventures are actually not at all what we think they are. Our primary method of communication in language is subject to core ambiguities at the semantic layer. Certainly, the training data is formative but insofar as language itself is concerned, these disjointedly discontinuous misrepresentations […]

Categories
Philosophy

Omniscience

A provocative hypothesis emerges from the rapid evolution of technology: the phenomenon we’re witnessing in accelerated technological speciation (and convergence) is not localized but rather a distributed systemic property. We generally think to localize the essence of Artificial Intelligence within distinct nodes or points. This localization serves a practical purpose, enabling us to dissect and […]

Categories
cybernetics

AI and Strategy

The relationship of new technologies with sustainable organisational learning and growth is not itself new. It’s a journey of adaptive sociotechnical integration that is as beneficial to consider in the strategic whole as it is mandatory to define and refine in the instrumental parts. What is new is that non-linear effects are inevitable at scale. […]