Categories
culture

Evanescence

Travelling into the future is an inverse archaeology of entropy. There is some possible future, a singular branch of most probable outcomes in an undiscovered and unknowable configuration of ourselves towards which we all travel. A small consolation lies in being clever enough to decode this inexorable material process and abstract logical labyrinth of decay […]

Categories
Philosophy

Artificial Intelligence and an Archaeology of the Present

While we are able to cultivate semi-autonomous technical solutions that provide insight into material records of communication and – through them – a historical sedimentation of the self-replicating complexities of culture and cognition in information-encoding logic (as language), we seem a little less able to apply those same technical solutions to untangle the challenges represented […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Non-sense

Just what would you think if it came to pass that everything that you thought was you was not and everything else was inside out? Like that light that strikes the back of your eye, doubly inverted before it renders a representation and (dis)simulation of reality inside the effervescent neuroelectrical enigma of you – that […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Strangest Thing: A Labyrinth of Words and Meanings

It is the strangest thing. Words are sounds, symbols and patterns of electrical energy inside brains. They are abstractions, generated from the shared world of our experience but not fundamentally dependent upon it. The words we use invoke the thoughts and concepts or images with which we think and understand the world we share. The […]

Categories
culture narrative Psychology

The Psychological Vacuum of Games

I am for my own reasons holding out against complete personal digital metamorphosis and still receive a large percentage of my news media through television, regardless that the electromagnetic signal itself is digitally-encoded. An advantage that I derive from television news is that, unlike the overtly digital communications channels of social media and YouTube, the […]

Categories
communication Philosophy technology

The Necessity of Proliferating Vulnerabilities: a General Philosophy of Cyber Security

Compressed: It is something of an inevitability of both logic and of physics that the more components a material system has – including the diverse and recombinatory abstractions and logic of algorithmic, information and energy-processing (i.e. computational) systems – the more disordered states of entropy that are also possible, indeed – probable within and as […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Continuity of Civilisation

What we more often fail to observe or acknowledge about the generally messy and entropic state of international relations and an apparent inevitability of internecine conflict is that, as a whole, human civilisation is autonomously calculating and computing the optimal means and methods for self-propagation and systemic continuity.  Homeostasis is not engendered through aspiration towards […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Information Systems: Self-Gravitational Collapse

In a world of information over-saturation, where the constant bombardment of spectacle, news and entertainment has reached a fever-pitch of colour and noise, where images, faces, people and (our) lives rush past (and through) us at an ever-accelerating pace – we find ourselves inhabiting the vacuum of our own dissatisfaction and dissonant disconnection with the […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Broken Machines

The image in the mirror of the world is that limited comprehension and linear system by which we might successfully (or at least partially) render our own selves. Taking our own projected image and anachronistic mechanical logic of causal intent or purpose as being a self-evident and unquestionable intuition of the way the world functions, […]

Categories
Psychology

Emotionally Random

I wonder at times if all of our emotional lives are little more than random fluctuations and transient, effervescent flickering candle flames in the chaos of our minds and of this, our shared world. Somewhere between the volatile, if probabilistically determinate, entropy of physiological or cognitive reflex and those diverse rationales and causes we retrospectively […]

Categories
culture Philosophy

The Symbolic Vacuum of Nothing

In any sequence of symbols, experiences or other functional input to our various sensory apertures, the entity and events which bear the most unexpected or surprising data are those which can be said to carry the most substantive information content. In a world awash in a semiotic soup of aspirational novelty and atention-seeking advertisements, billboards, […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

The Plausible Necessity of Political Incompetence

Why is it that ideological, political and organisational ineptitude and incompetence are endlessly reoccurring phenomena? If the longer-term evolutionary or biological history of a living system, including it’s diverse manifestations in and as cultural and political systems, is oriented towards efficient self-replication and continuity, why is it that so many poor-fitting (and indeed – positively […]