Tag: disinformation

Categories
cybernetics

Disinformation Dynamics

Language is a dynamic communicative field of oscillatory coupling, in which coherence, drift, and disinformation emerge as harmonic modes of the same process. Drawing on Kuramoto’s synchronisation model, synergetics, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, and information theory, this essay interprets linguistic activity as rhythmic modulation between repetition and deviation. Meaning arises through metastable oscillation among semantic attractors, maintained […]

Categories
cybernetics

Lattice

Meaning can be understood as relational invariance under transformation. In mathematics, invariance is what stays the same when everything else changes. In physics, such stability gives rise to conservation laws — momentum from translational symmetry, energy from temporal symmetry. Language behaves the same way: its meaning persists not through fixed definitions but through relationships that […]

Categories
Philosophy

Everybody’s Talking at Me

Sometimes, when people look at me and speak, I don’t hear the words—I see the mouth moving and hear the noise, nothing more. It feels like those moments when a familiar word suddenly turns strange, hollowed of meaning, its surface exposed. I think this happens to all of us: every so often, language reveals itself […]

Categories
cybernetics

World War Z: Disinformation

The soup de jour is disinformation: I found myself watching the movie World War Z (again) recently. The biological plausibility of a zombie virus that can detect and avoid sickness as a critical vulnerability and plot twist wasn’t quite enough to render the movie as being anything significantly other than “Brad Pitt saves the world, […]

Categories
cybernetics

Tautological System Dynamics

I wonder if we should be more concerned that fake news (as mis- and disinformation) exists, or that reality is so easily decoupled from our descriptions of it. It says quite a lot about the tautological dynamics of communication systems (of belief) that they are generally and only ever referentially anchored upon themselves.

Categories
cybernetics

Not True

A critical nexus: the assumption of truth as the lowest-energy level or ground-state, system attractor and natural telos of communication. Such beliefs are credible, plausible and compelling but are mistaken. Communication systems are proxy organic entities, maximally-oriented towards the reproduction of themselves and seek to prime their own self-entangled transmission media for existential continuity. The […]

Categories
communication

Disinformation Wars

In a distributed, ubiquitous information space, everything (including this brief paragraph) is in play. While it is true that complex communications systems can (and do) have many centers of gravity, some of the interesting considerations here orbit a fact that the ascendant networks and platforms of information transmission maximally persist as a function of replicability, […]

Categories
Philosophy

Falsehoods Fly and Language Lies

The essence of communication in linguistically-bound domains is to generate just enough ambiguity (reads here as “falsity”, but elsewhere as “nuance”) to optimally self-propagate syntactical and semantic artefacts. It is a kernel and core bias of communication to orient itself towards those heuristics of self-replication that themselves, well, self-replicate and notwithstanding that all of us […]

Categories
Psychology

Collective Psychosis

On the topic of untenable belief systems, unsubstantiated conspiracies, intransigent disinformation and ideological absurdity – I was watching a lecture from Gresham College today in which psychosis was posited as the default mental state. If the default state of human mental life is in fact some kind of dissociative discontinuity and stochastic chaos, this might […]

Categories
culture

Misinformation: Partisan Enigmas

We have inadvertently painted ourselves into an unexpected corner here. I admire any and all attempts to ameliorate the parlous situation that contemporary media and communication networks find themselves in but there is something of an irreducible enigma of dissonant complexity that we are as yet unable to unambiguously identify, let alone resolve by seeding […]

Categories
information

Complexity, Disinformation, Strategy

An ineradicable problem in the context of engaging disinformation is that, of all possible paths we might as a fledgling technological civilisation have taken through the vast forest of combinatorial possibility, we have arrived in and at a world in which partisan difference and deceptive, adversarial contests have become the  methods by and through which […]

Categories
technology

The Big Business of Disinformation

Context: How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation There’s the rub. Not only do complex information and communication networks optimally self-propagate through the autonomous cultivation of threshold levels of dissonance, error and what amounts here to a nurtured “fidelity drift”, commercial and existential (corporate) incentives in this context are quite natively oriented towards it. The […]