The song Police and Thieves first bounced me in the middle of The Harder They Come—Jimmy Cliff cutting through the screen like a switchblade, though I later learned it wasn’t on the original soundtrack. Junior Murvin’s falsetto rides Lee Perry’s eerie dub production like smoke on broken glass, all shimmer and warning. The song isn’t […]
Prohibition, as a policy archetype, emerges from an institutional reflex: control harm by restricting access. At surface level, this seems rational. But the U.S. opioid crisis reveals its flaw with brutal clarity. Decades of interdiction, scheduling, and enforcement have not stopped overdose deaths—they’ve amplified them. Synthetic opioids like fentanyl bypass traditional supply chains, intensify risk, […]
Attempts to prohibit are not failures of intelligence but failures of systemic insight. The logic is recursive: the more force applied to negate a behaviour, the more structure is built around that behaviour to preserve it. Prohibition becomes a generator — not a suppressor — of the phenomenon it targets. The system does not respond […]
An analytical framework, as much as its denizens, loves nothing so much as a murder mystery to solve and short of the wars and (other) international intrigues that often lead to all manner of unjust killings, the forensic science of unexplained death plays a special role in cultural and media reflexivity. I do not suggest […]
Context: Cybercrooks are telling ChatGPT to create malicious code Exponentiation… it’s a language game, all of it. The hyper-inflating state space of all combinatorial possibility has a tendency to drift, through entropy, into precisely those transient structural constellations that maximally reproduce: • not only the elements and instances or references, idioms, sentences, logical fragments and […]
The whole sorry mess of this conflict strikes me as a psychological (as much as ideological) pathology that endlessly reproduces itself, not as a function or measure of its successes but as the heroic recharacterisation (as you reflect, above) of its failures and suffering. It is perhaps a little like a gyroscope that follows its […]
Context: The Criminal Potential of Artificial Intelligence Beyond autonomous cybernetic system as tool or aperture of adversarial vulnerability lies the distinct possibility of AI as malevolent criminal mastermind. Notwithstanding the current paucity of anything even vaguely resembling Artificial General Intelligence, and regardless of our best (and worst) aspirations to benchmark and bootstrap this technology into […]
Context: Utah cyberattacks on the rise as millions paid out in new ‘double-extortion’ ransomware schemes Does there ever come a point at which the accelerating combinatorial complexity of this context transcends human aptitude to comprehend and mitigate the hyper-inflating entropy of the problem-space? I imagine that as long as human brains, incentives and motivations are […]
The perceived value of any particular information system, entity or artefact is directly proportional to the combined resources applied to protect it from unauthorised access. It is only as a function of the most simply-conceived models and idealised frameworks that such a dynamical system could ever remain static and unchanging. The reality is that complex […]
The discussion that no one appears willing to have is that from the very inception of these information technologies, doubt and uncertainty has been endemic and irreducible. Turing’s proof of the implicit undecidability of computation took its recursive cues from Gödel’s prime number shenanigans in the Incompleteness proof. These systems are first and foremost open […]
Implicit and endemic grey-zone ambiguities mean that this might never be attributed to anything other than (yet) another heartlessly self-serving criminal enterprise that is leveraging the inflated value of hospitals and health data during a public health crisis. I expect there are some logical and legal hurdles in defining acts of war this way. Not […]
Context: Facebook: Recommended Principles for Regulation or Legislation to Combat Influence Operations It is a fascinating issue. I suggest that the complexity of the problem far outstrips these assertions of interdiction and oversight. We have seen pretty much the same thing happen in cyber security. Where a property or quality, if not the actual content, […]
Daedelus Kite 