There is little doubt that our cultural systems are communications networks, albeit of considerably higher dimensionality than (even) the digital telecommunications systems with which we are all now so necessarily well-acquainted. In a spirit of relatively non-specific philosophical reflection, questions quite naturally arise as to the carrying capacity of these cultural networks and of what […]
Has anyone noticed that the smaller these computational and communications artefacts become, the more rapidly this whole planetary technological juggernaut accelerates? There’s something of an uncertainty principle here – the more precisely we can measure, define and inhabit the various technological transmission media, the less certain we become about the velocity (and direction or destination) […]
Our shared future is built from our collective past every bit as much as is this present moving moment. Even as the technological juggernaut of contemporary civilisation endlessly accelerates around us, we rarely find time to gaze long and deep into this collective past through the many artefacts, entities and cultural systems that came before […]
Concrete evidence that the West does not have a monopoly on gullible fools. The question is, or becomes, are citizens in democracies or in totalitarian regimes more prone to dissociative conspiratorial narratives? Intuition suggests that it may be the totalitarian states that generate more compliant idiots but the greater freedoms of the West leave people […]
There are some failing metaphysical assumptions and troubled subjectivities in the notionally “Western” position and its attendant parochialisms. A drift through deterministic materialism and downstream mechanical (or algorithmic) thinking into untenable philosophical positions also seems somewhat inevitable, if perhaps not entirely irremediable. I am constantly fascinated (and yet to be quite honest also simultaneously horrified) […]
There is, perhaps, as much to be said for an acquired art and experience of “self-surveillance” as there is of the orchestrated ubiquity of surveillance in information and (communications) technology that Orwell predicted. The longer arc and trajectory of human history has been one in which the inflating internal, interior spaces of memory and perception […]
Simultaneously admirable and fascinating, Ukrainian archivists are working hard to keep their language and culture safe. The language and written words by and through which human beings define their commonalities and cultural bonds of collaborative identity, as much as their resonant and dissonant differences, is unveiled as the treasure worth fighting for that it has […]
I am quite interested in the ways in which a normative gamification of language (in wordle, crosswords, quizzes, tests and other educational, institutional, political or ideological taxonomies) reflects and reinforces the essentially probabilistic information signal that inflects all linguistic statements, descriptions and assertions of fact with significance. The words, concepts and downstream grammatical or cultural […]
Cultural processing of information is one of the main tasks we carry out. It is costly and can be very difficult. Our brains are on one hand dedicated to the maintenance and sustainable continuity of the bodily vessels that support them but also must process the symbolic complexity required to sustain the systems of culture […]
There’s an idiom to the effect that when you find yourself in a traffic jam you are never “stuck in traffic”, you are traffic. It’s something of a cognitive and linguistic reflex to identify an artefact, entity or system as a bounded or isolated fact in the forest of references and definitions that we inhabit. […]
In our colloquially-asserted hard borders and boundaries as difference and distance between human and machine I wonder if we do not, indeed, simply replicate the questions of trust that exist between persons and groups in embodied, organic intelligence. The relationships between human beings and their technologies are only really a special case of a much […]
Context: World Politics at the Edge of Chaos: Reflections on Complexity and Global Life I have been deep down a rabbit hole of seeking to apply these complexity thinking insights more broadly for the last few years. One key, kernel and core takeaway is that (we) human beings seem on the whole quite poorly equipped […]
Daedelus Kite 