As a general observation on censorship, redaction and purposeful obfuscation: Information Theory indicates the extent to which strings of symbols bear useful or valuable information and this is measured by the probabilistic entropy and literal surprise of that salience. An enigma of redaction is that, while the extraction of prominent or revealing features of narrative […]
I fear that the introduction of rules, prescriptive boundaries and frameworks will not inhibit the militarisation of this context so much as positively incentivise it, the culture and history of adversarial psychology being what it is. A line must certainly be drawn in the sand, but it seems that most of these (kinds of) prohibitions […]
When the recombinatory convergence of once-distant or disparate symbols no longer shocks us, it is probably not merely because the world (and it’s inhabitants) have moved on and desensitised to the essential information entropy of difference. It is because these once dissonant symbols share some deeper (and logical) bond. The cultural and psychological self-representation of […]
For many years now, I have been fascinated by the mischievous, mysterious relationship between material systems (like living organisms) and the astoundingly complex information abstractions, systems and relationships within which they quite literally swim. I have mentioned parasitic wasps before – in a related context – but encountered an interesting article today which got me […]
In any context where an employment and technology ecosystem is so rapidly evolving – recognising talents, skills and aptitude becomes about as difficult and as (ultimately and) unmanageably complex as acquiring or maintaining them. What interests me here is a second-order semantic analysis: there is such an efflorescence of salient wisdom and clever advice available, […]
The indefinitely extensible essence of logic (Gödel, 1931) is both bug *and* feature. That which provides a possibility of recombinatory (technological, organisational, psychological) development, of the degrees of freedom by which we might define (and endlessly redefine) the meaning and substance of “intelligence” or “technology”, is also the tangled hierarchy of inertia and entropy within […]
Cognitive diversity represents that useful, recombinatory information entropy from which insight and innovation assert and reproduce or replicate themselves. A subtle, adaptive balance between self-propagating continuity and incessant metamorphosis is the source of as many evolutionary wonders as it is of the abstract information origami of psychological, cultural and technological enigmas with which we are […]
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, […]
I came across an interesting idea today: the production of a new, reliable, verifiable, safe and trustworthy social media platform. My reflex was to think: what of the tendency of information and energy-processing (i.e. communications) systems to autonomously drift into optimally-concise patterns and methods of self-propagation? There is no particular brilliance about Facebook et. al. […]
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. […]
Why does homelessness occur and why is it so difficult to find and apply lasting solutions? In a nutshell: Entropy. This is not a rhetorical affectation but as an authentic explanatory and causal explanation. Many socioeconomic problems are complex but within a relatively limited problem “dimensionality” – consider crowd control or public transport. They are […]
The accelerating hyper-inflation of information and communications technology networks and systems is an overextended structural entity. The primary reason it does not immediately collapse back upon itself is the existence of uncertainty, useful ambiguity and logical entropy. The more components and logical relationships we have, the more those systems themselves generate further artefacts, abstractions and […]
Daedelus Kite 