Categories
politics

Dictatorship: Living in Two Worlds

Dictators of course arrive wearing many diverse kinds of masks and singing all manner of simplistic songs of self-interested nationalism. For those of you out there who find themselves living under such a regime, it must be a really strange experience. It is true that we all tend to desensitise to hardship or suffering after […]

Categories
technology

Elon Musk: Selling Utopian Technological Fantasies

Context: Elon Musk Insists on Autonowashing, Says Tesla Will License Autonomy to Anyone Commercial value is, perhaps, always a function of the difference(s) between aspiration and reality. Marketing as entrepreneurial exercise of relatively shameless self-promotion always and already presupposes the existence of some future state and well-polished (generally Utopian) fantasy upon which narrative (and prospective […]

Categories
Psychology

Fantasy

As objective reality is essentially an unattainable metaphysical assertion, all systems of belief and subjective identities are anchored not in fact but upon themselves.

Categories
Organisation

The Rudderless Reality of Human Systems

It always strikes me as being an astonishingly dark irony that the core and kernel of a psychologically reflexive desire to identify or assert centralised control systems in the world is quite plausibly the key causal factor that almost entirely problematises and renders such control as functionally impossible. This indicates a deeper psychological property and […]

Categories
culture

Femme Fatale

The “femme fatale”, a dangerous, panther-like beauty in which all of man’s desires and fears are realised in one gorgeous, dark and explosive bundle of alluring seduction and imminent volcano-like fury. This is the fantasy of woman upon which an unwitting, gullible and endlessly-amorous male identity anchors itself – in language, image, technology, culture and […]

Categories
Psychology

The Paradoxical Haunting of Selfhood

What is (perhaps) even more curious than this, the translucent Cheshire Smile of a concept of Self that becomes an artefact around which we find ourselves (!) in endless free-fall and ontological orbit, is that the very difference and distance by and through which we define that self traps us in an intractable enigma. We […]

Categories
art

Malevolent Machines of Fear and Fantasy

Not so much “in the belly of the beast” as she is orchestrating the mechanism and behaviour of her own projected monsters. Similar observations might be made of humanity in gestalt: we find ourselves inadvertently consumed by these malevolent machines and embodied technological architectures of our own manifest fear. Art by Will Murai

Categories
Psychology

The Complex Spaces of Psychological (and Cultural) Self-Deception

It is often simpler to love the unknown and the unknowable; a perfect enigma and unsolved mystery represents the endless seduction of a treasure that hovers playfully, eternally just out of reach and in pursuit of which we might build a whole personality, culture and civilisation.  How often do we choose a distant fantasy over […]

Categories
life

The Improbable Dream

It can be simultaneously entertaining and cathartic to dream improbable dreams…

Categories
culture

Once in a Lifetime

This is not my life…

Categories
Philosophy

Impossible destinations

Honesty with other people can be difficult; honesty with ourselves can prove to be impossible…