Categories
Peace

Putin dreams of Stalingrad

The horror of war is only ever equivocable to its absurdity. As much as we must negotiate and navigate such catastrophes where and when they occur, I am uncertain that our collaborative historical analyses provide much more than a resonant disincentive to engage with and enter into the wars that appear to be as inevitable […]

Categories
information

Cybersecurity: One Oxymoron to Rule them All

In regards to some study and incidental (as unplanned) research I was engaged in recently, it seems to be most eminently true that the very information and communications technologies upon which we now so critically depend are profoundly, deeply and irredeemably unreliable. This may be no big news to you but I think it justifies […]

Categories
Philosophy

Organisational Orbitals of Language

It is as a consequence of the extent to which linear logic and causal intuitions have been successful (as technology) that we tend to assert similarly deterministic prescriptions regarding the relationships between artefacts, entities and systems in the world. Yes, there are often simple abstractions that map with relative fidelity upon the facts of our […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Vanishing

More reflections on cosmological conundrums, today. It occurs to me that whatever the Universe (or really – our descriptions of it) is, it is actually trying to vanish. The natural bias and orientation towards entropic disassembly and diffusion is that through this system in gestalt aspires to reach the lowest energy state. The mischievous irony […]

Categories
cybernetics

A.I., Creativity, Copyright and Plagiarism in Art

Context: Copyright infringement in artificial intelligence art I know a developer that pulled all their code from Github because of Copilot. It is an interesting area of study because, much as has been said of Mozart, AI in its variously generative species are in essence not doing anything profoundly new, they are doing what has […]

Categories
culture

Human Slavery and the Serial Failure of Governments

It is simpler, if often appropriate, to condemn governments for their serial failures to successfully negotiate and interdict slavery and human trafficking. We would all do well to also understand that the reproduction of specific, known and well-defined classes of inequitable outcomes are not merely a consequence of corruption and failures of intelligence where these […]

Categories
Philosophy

Technology as Transmission Medium for Difference

Technology is a transmission medium for the difference as information and individuation that it then proceeds to iteratively articulate and amplify. The unrelenting technological metamorphosis in which we exist is in this way generated by its own positive as self-accelerating feedback loops, both logico-technical and human-existential. It is in one (limited) sense a closed feedback […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Freedom, Censorship and Totalitarian Psychosis

Context: Russia charges journalist who protested Ukraine war live on TV It seems that those most prolific Machiavellian manufacturers of misinformation have not learned even the rudimentary core of lessons in regards to the autonomous self-propagation of complex information artefacts, entities and systems. Prosecution and persecution intended to silence and intimidate only ever recapitulates and […]

Categories
Philosophy

Nothing

I’m of the exquisitely unpopular, largely incomprehensible and eminently unhelpful philosophical opinion that if we were able to calculate it to within a Planck’s length of its life, the sum total of all complex systems as measured along the axes of energy, information and entropy would be zero. That which remains conspicuously absent (and likely […]

Categories
Philosophy

On the Knowledge of Gloriously Inconsequential Beauty in Nature and Ourselves

Nature is interesting and beautiful, of course, and in all the many and diverse ways an environmental context and integrated system expresses itself in its bounded instances. I often do this and by inverse approach to either and both aesthetic or functional appraisal, consider the instance of embodied phenotype as being a mezzanine artefact and […]

Categories
cybernetics

On Describing Complex Systems

My experience, beyond an effervescing percolation of the very many sociotechnical instances with which both we and our reflexively teleological heuristics of symbolic communication (in and as language) aspire to epistemological closure, is that there is no simplest state or unified descriptive method available to us. Yes, we can iteratively refine taxonomies and (what become) […]

Categories
communication

Communicating Science: Systems

I’m a committed advocate for the importance of systems theory, cybernetics and complexity science but the solution of communication precisely is the problem. It is not a bundle of ideas or throwaway conceptual vocabularies that can ever compress down to a brief logo. The conservation of cognitive as much as cultural resources predisposes people to […]