Will the technology companies, and their shareholders, absorb responsibility, act with maturity, offer guidance, or exercise restraint. I doubt it. There is no leadership here, only a sustained sprint for more cash. When the AI bubble bursts, expect thousands of reflexive startups to follow. Not to repair damage or learn anything, but to capitalise on […]
Attempts to stabilise volatile systems by force tend to amplify and exacerbate the volatility they were intended to contain. Sons of Anarchy staged this in miniature: each shortcut, retaliation, or opportunistic scheme deepened the instability that provoked it. The club kept solving yesterday’s damage with tomorrow’s disaster because the logic driving their decisions never changed. […]
Freedom is a word cheapened by misuse. It is invoked as if it were the license to insult, exclude, dominate, or wall oneself off from others while insisting that such enclosure is liberation. Yet what masquerades as independence becomes dependence on the harm and isolation of others, a brittle shell that requires continual reinforcement. This […]
Possibly the least comforting fact in regards to the Oval Office being two sandwiches and a sledge hammer away from becoming the Presidential rage room, is that a wide disaffection and alienated sense of abandonment that has in some measure led to this catastrophic shit show, it’s not entirely wrong. Ah, now there’s a problem: […]
You would think that any self-respecting species possessing intellectual and technological aptitude sufficient to fathom the deepest mysteries of the Cosmos might also be able to avoid its own imminent catastrophic dissolution and descent into conflict, environmental disassembly, geopolitical dissonance and self-destruction. Not, as it turns out, this distributed material and symbolic human being within […]
Context: Why do we ignore catastrophic risk? It may just be that some entities, artefacts, events or (other) possibilities are so vast and so horrifying that they all but entirely invalidate the limited linguistic or cognitive referential frame(s) of this comforting little semiotic cocoon of complex tautologies and half-mirrored surfaces within which we (all) live. […]
Beyond the self-evident inadequacies of our integrated bureaucratic hierarchies, the labyrinth of systemic biases which have funneled wealth into corporate welfare and monopolistic hegemonies are now revealing their utter ineptitude at providing adequate socioeconomic resilience. You could ask why no one saw this coming. Many people did, they just did not know what shape or […]
It may be a matter of social and psychological necessity that this kind of monumental existential threat – to which we have perhaps long been desensitised by repetition and the droning monotony of unnecessarily adversarial ideological and political competition – carry more impact, more information entropy and cultural gravity when they become a tangible, material, […]
Double-edged swords are the rule, rather than the exception, it seems and it is in general a monumental communications failure that risks and vulnerabilities are not sufficiently (publicly) acknowledged and appropriately managed. Should technology creators be held responsible for the potential disorder and malfeasance to which their products and technologies are applied? Notwithstanding the economic […]
Every day, in the afternoon or early evening, for around 4 weeks a blanket of smoke has drifted across my city. I reflected on this here recently but tonight I found myself inadvertently caught up in the smoke as I was walking. My eyes are stinging, I have a sickening burnt wood taste in the […]
Don’t be fooled into a false sense of security by the fact that a worst-case climate apocalypse is intimately terrifying on a scale exceeding any story that humanity ever told itself and is so far beyond our limited experience that we more readily characterise it as myth or fiction. At the scale of disaster we […]
Daedelus Kite 