The symbolic value with very concrete consequences... The more we reflexively structure, cultivate and sediment our cultural identities, psychological subjectivity and civilisation around (and through) a limiting grammar and vocabulary of runaway greed, the more we find ourselves trapped in a spiral of accelerating entropy. Context: Thomas Keneally's 2020s vision: We must abandon the language…
Zen, Climate and Love: Disassembling a Fallacy of Difference
Zen is to utterly deconstruct, disassemble and reconceptualise Self and Mind. It is difficult medicine but the mischievous enigma at the core of all of our problems is our Self. Decentralised psychological subjectivity and cultural presence is one in which adversarial competition is dissolved as there is no foundational differentiation between persons, property or places.Utopias,…
Technology: Utopian Aspirations?
Utopian aspirations are inevitably three parts marketing and one part plausibility. While communication (as much as communications platforms or technologies) is necessarily a matter of endlessly effervescent linguistic or logical self-inflection, the implicit openness of our contemporary context and the cognitive hyper-extension of technological complexity represents cost and burden as much as it does utility.A…
Political Problems: the ubiquitous, intractable and shared enigmas of outsourcing our rationality to those least able to effectively use it
A central problem of all political systems is that the idealised abstractions of those systems are of a fundamentally different kind or class of entity than are the lived experiences and material extension or implementation of those systems into, upon, through and as the world. There is a fundamental (and foundational) discontinuity between the material…
The Shadows of Entropy
It is a truth almost universally known but rarely, if ever, acknowledged that the strengths and the values of our world are simultaneously its weakness and qualitative (as much as quantitative) poverty. Contemporary communications systems have, for instance, been truly wonderous - they have brought us all closer together through near-instaneous text, voice and video…
Self-Propagating Technological Metamorphosis
If you listen very carefully you can almost hear a faint whooshing sound as the vacuum created in the wake of the products of our own creative intelligence, which having long ago outpaced us, draws us inexorably along behind it. As the accelerating juggernaut of pure and abstract technological metamorphosis has always - and perhaps…
Climate Strike: Which Economy?
I observed a characteristically parochial performance from a politician on the morning news today. The topic of the Global Climate Strike was under analysis and the tired old excuses for workers and schoolchildren not attending the rallies and protests were wobbled around with rhetorical ineptitude. An argument was made for the importance of a strong…
Disentangling the Enigmatic Adversities of Socioeconomic Recursion
The distributed information systems which we experience as social, cultural, economic and cognitive (or technologically-mediated) reality are implicitly weighted towards the self-replication and reproduction of existing patterns and biases.
Cultivating Innovation
Sociological, psychological and economic systems are poorly optimised to cultivate or acknowledge the forms of innovation and creative thinking that their existence in the world depends upon.
Can anyone own the moon ?
If personal subjectivity is a reflection of an internalised concept of ownership and property, what happens if it turns out that neither individual identity nor notions of ownership are, beyond a very limited and historically or culturally contingent sense, actually real ?
Entrepreneurial Hubris in Silicon Valley
It is a gargantuan investment and leap of faith to assert, predict or seek to influence technological trajectories over a time scale of centuries.
Manufacturing Loneliness
Psychological deficits and emotional asymmetry may the price (or at least - the cost) of social, economic and cultural continuity.
