Categories
Philosophy

Kindness

For a world in which aggression, control and variously domineering forms of persuasion and exploitation have been serially celebrated and canonised as virtuous – communicating the significance of humility and compassion takes on all the character and significance of an authentic act of kindness. You are never simply stuck in bad traffic, you (and we […]

Categories
Philosophy

Technological Alchemy

It is worth reflecting that, as though some elementary yet monumentally high-dimensional linear reflex, it is at precisely the moment when our collective intelligence and expressive creativity is set free by #technology that we are also quite utterly and unwittingly imprisoned by it. As above, so below… indeed.

Categories
freedom Philosophy

A Blank Sheet of Paper

A blank sheet of paper, indeed. In the Tao Te Ching (“Way of Life”), Lao Tze wrote of the ways in which the void and vacuum which is always an absent presence represents the anchor of life, of experience and freedom. The hole in the wheel is that which makes it useful; the absence in […]

Categories
Philosophy

Trapped in the Language that Frees Us

Have you noticed that the collective self-definitions that unite us are simultaneously the boundaries and borders that isolate and alienate us from each other and from ourselves? We are (all) both freed by and trapped in the linguistically-mediated systems of belief we inhabit. I don’t think this is a resolvable enigma but it is certainly […]

Categories
Philosophy

Reverse Engineering the Future with Curiosity-Driven Research

I wonder if commercial incentives might not destructively inhibit and limit the possible range and diversity of all possible research and applications. By which I mean that decoupling curiosity-driven research from purely commercial incentives might open up a much vaster state space of combinatorial possibility than could otherwise exist or be beneficially investigated. It would […]

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
life

Trapped by Choice

Ever noticed that the more connected we all are, the more isolated we become? The more we are compelled to anchor our identities, experience and memory upon an external world, the lonelier and less certain this inner self becomes? Having once passed over the event horizon of self-accelerating sociotechnical metamorphosis we are each and all […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Theatre of Belief

I’ve been fascinated for some time in the many ways that systems of belief are essentially performative. Those beliefs that people hold to be self-evident and unquestionably true exist almost exclusively as public expressions of identity and cultural affiliation. In both religion and politics, but not limited to these, the expression and coded pantomime that […]

Categories
history

The Totalitarian Enigma

The enigma of the totalitarian state is that it must constantly invoke by provocation precisely those threats and fears that its ideology is founded upon to validate the brute-forced tyrannical exploitation and mobster-kleptocratic oppression of its own people. It is a cycle and spiral of sheer absurdity that would be fascinating to observe as the […]

Categories
Philosophy

Autocracy is Addicted to Fear

We all know that the mobster kleptocracy has been catastrophically miscalculating at least in part due to a narrative dependency of getting high on its own supply of disinformation but in the monumental strategic blunder that this invasion represents they display the kernel core of a neurotic psychological pathology. An implicit orientation towards the positive […]

Categories
Philosophy

Freedom from Self

I’ve said it before and I will say it again: freedom is not of self, it is from self. The boundaries and borders by and through which we define and cultivate our selves are also and quite counter-intuitively the shackles and chains that bind us. It is something of a paradox – the more we […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

World Peace

If it were not so utterly catastrophic, this situation would be as fascinating now as it might be to some future generation of historians. The combinatorial entropy as intractable complexity of conflict being what it is, and the perennial failure of institutional language (or individual cognition) to adequately represent (or assert control upon) it, what […]