Categories
Philosophy

Conscious AI?

I’d be much more worried about an unconscious AI. The impending corporate dissimulation of an omniscient technocratic overlord will attract and acquire all the trappings and recursively self-propagating (human) interfaces of a complex system that maximally self-propagates and self-sustains as a function of the uncertainties it invokes in regards to ambiguities regarding the proof of […]

Categories
politics

Russia’s Authoritarian Self-Validation

Is it worth reflecting that the fear and insecurity this event generates within Russia is precisely the bread and butter of authoritarian self-validation. The Kremlin’s leadership has painted itself into to a lonely corner of brutalising isolation, futile alienation and haunted escalatory rhetoric. It has done so precisely because it knows no other way of […]

Categories
Philosophy

Should we Pause Artificial Intelligence?

Observe how we fear the generative mechanisms of our own self-reproduction. Language lives through us just as we do through it and were it not that the developers and the discoveries will unlikely be put back in their genie bottles any time soon, we might successfully regulate the rapidly percolating uncertainties that our own unbounded […]

Categories
Philosophy

Troglodyte Dictators

It is not always immediately obvious but it remains as something of an irreducible fact that the variously self-branded dictators, imperialists and draconian autocrats of this world are really quite unintelligent. Yes, they may have many thousands of very clever individuals, organisations and institutions working on their behalf but the essence of their message and […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Putin’s Fear

Last night I dreamed of Putin’s death. We might well ask how the life of one man is anchored upon the death of so many others, how the privileged wealth and power of a few are the necessary conditions for the desperate poverty of so many, and how the world yet again finds itself staring […]

Categories
Philosophy

Resistance

There is a monumental level of incompetence and corruption in the Russian systems of command. I have no political interest and no partisan alignment. This is about humanity. It is an unjust war that is being fought for little more reason than that the insidiously oppressive totalitarian regime is entirely unable to comprehend that if […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Macabre Misanthropy of Russia’s War

Watching the aftermath of the mine on the armoured personnel carrier in that video, vehicle and body parts strewn like macabre confetti across a wide radius, I am reminded of the absurdity of a war being fought by the Russian soldiers to prop up the narrative pathologies of a political ideology that is positively addicted […]

Categories
freedom

On the Freedom of Women in Iran

The essence of all totalitarian regimes is that of the brutal oppression of their own people by any and all possible methods. The violent oppression of women in particular has a leading place in this current litany of relentless attrocities. The Iranian regime is grounded in and sustained by its pathological obsession with the control […]

Categories
history

Totalitarian Regime

The borders and boundaries as definitions and shared narratives which define us become even more valuable and important when they are perceived as under threat. The totalitarian political playbook begins (and ends) with the fabrication and cultivation of profoundly insecure borders, boundaries and differences that allow them to masquerade as strength and certainty, to play […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Storm clouds over Taipei, the psychology of Xi

Much stranger than that such belligerent fury and reckless risk-taking exists is that it persists and returns (with uncanny frequency) in cyclic political episodes and internecine escapades to haunt humanity in the ways it quite clearly does. There is a recurring theme of totalitarian ideological dependency upon the trope and narrative fabrication of having suffered […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

War and Hunger

The looming Global Food Crisis is not solely attributable to the war in Ukraine but there is absolutely no doubt that this conflict represents an accelerating and amplifying factor. We would do well to question the unrepentant stupidity of those who initiate invasions and wars. If starting a wildfire of brutality to leverage the uncertainty […]

Categories
cybernetics

Paranoiac Identity

The essence of the paranoiac is in every act and thought to reproduce, invoke and justify the circumstances that generate their paranoia. To indicate a specific instance may be to miss the point. Being a generalised bias of identity, individuation and subjectivity – it is a global property that appears in and as culture, communication […]