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Thinking of Ukraine

There are many words we might say, many ways in which we might offer support and hope to a people and a nation enduring the unrelenting brutality of invasion and war but, as always, someone once wrote a song that says it much better. Thinking of you, Ukraine.

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politics

Democracy, Peace, Complexity

Notice that from a complex systems interpretation, Democracy is always and already much more efficient in the management of (an) inevitably-arising internal dissonance or sophisticated, emergent complexity (i.e. entropy). It is a mandatory property of sustainable system continuity that entropy must be managed and, in a generalised sense, must be offset or displaced to an […]

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politics

Democracy

We are never going to find, define or unambiguously inhabit a “perfect” ideological, socioeconomic or political system. None of us – never. What we are able to do is to cultivate open, adaptive, complex networks and communities that most accurately approximate to modelling the natural world from which we emerged. Once we accept the implicit […]

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politics

Why Authoritarian Systems Fail

In thermodynamics, entropy is a measure of the disorder of a system. The natural bias of any ordered system system will always be to move towards equilibrium, where entropy is at a minimum. This is because a system will dissipate energy in order to become more ordered. In a complex system, entropy is necessary to […]

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communication

Negotiating the Dark Side of Social Media

An enigma: the shambling, self-propagating golem [let’s not kid ourselves – it’s much more Frankenstein than Jetsons] of mass/social communications systems maximally self-propagates and recursively reproduces itself through precisely the dissonant turbulence that we are now obligated to engage as both an existential threat and aperture of opportunity. How, in other words, to bootstrap, loop […]

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Philosophy

Competitive Difference is the Optimal State of Complex Socioeconomic Systems

Context: https://youtu.be/2Uj1A9AguFs Vertical motion in this chart is a measure of the degree to which any of the organisations or entities recursively and reflexively facilitates global information system self-replication. This is precisely how complex information-processing systems function: they autonomously self-select for those components, entities and sub-systems that optimally bias for the replication of the overall […]

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Philosophy politics

Democracy Oscillates

Context: Math explains polarization, and it’s not just about politics The mathematics indicates aspects of causal necessity, perhaps, in dynamical systems but we might turn to a complementary psychological ontology of polarisation, Othering and system differentiation. A partisan point of view (or mind and associated political, ideological subjectivity) is always and already inversely anchored and […]

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technology

Hardening Democracies against Disinformation and Cyber Vulnerabilities

Context: The next pandemic may be cyber — How Biden administration can stop it Interesting article, but the centralisation of resources and administrative control is a limited and piecemeal assertion over a global and overall systemic problem: • the irreducible, implicit and generally unacknowledged insecurity of digital technologies represents something of a leaking bucket that could […]

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Alien Anthropology

Spinning Democracy: Capitol Insurrection

Context: China, Russia, Iran Spin Capitol Insurrection A note on geopolitical spin: very much like quantum entangled pairs, it exists in a superposition of states – measurement along a particular axis produces the reality. Most instances of perceived weakness can as easily infer strength – it just depends upon which axes of measurement (and narrative) […]

Categories
Philosophy

Problems of Constitutional Democracy

Watching the information bonfire of the current US election processes is troubling, to say the least. Beyond external interference in the fidelity of democracy and the internal dissonance of a nation being in many ways torn apart by incessant adversarial posturing and partisan self-interest, there is in this situation an instance of some broader unresolved […]

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Alien Anthropology

How, exactly, does Democracy survive?

An interesting observation is: if you consider the overall system of antithetical ideologies and jockeying competitive (self-)interests in play here, the self-defining competition between Democracy and “Other” kinds of political system seems to be a necessary component in the sustainable continuity of Democracy itself. The gestalt of the Global information-processing system lumbers and lurches along […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

American Decline

American capitalism is an evolving information and energy-processing (i.e. computational) system and complex socioeconomic metabolism that possesses implicit spatial, temporal and material limits. Where boundaries are eventually encountered, the reflexive impulse is for any such system so foundationally grounded upon assumptions of the heroic values implicit to (a) consumptive necessity to begin, slowly – at […]