Categories
literature

Mnemosyne

Mnemosyne, the Titaness of Memory, stands as one of the most profound figures in Greek mythology, embodying the living thread of memory that weaves the past into the present and propels it into the future. She is the daughter of Uranus (Sky) and Gaia (Earth), representing a primordial force whose power shapes not only individual […]

Categories
politics

The Sleep of Reason

Is America sleepwalking into tyrrany? El sueño de la razón produce monstruos. Context: How far would Trump go? I’m really very grateful that I live in a democracy that is not, currently at least, painfully and publicly disassembling itself.

Categories
Philosophy

Freedom

To claim, to reclaim, to assert ownership or self-determination, in almost any conceivable constellation of semantics and implicature, is simultaneously an act of submission, concession and referential, relational displacement in, through and as language. Technology functions quite similarly in that every aspirational act and assertion of communication and control is only ever rendered intelligible and […]

Categories
Philosophy

Reflections

It seems quite petty and inadequate to aspire to “simply” solve just one of the world’s complex problems. Let’s solve them all, simultaneously. What is the one thing that every thing shares? What essence or abstraction binds the world together in some way as “reality” or intelligibility and experience? While it may be possible that […]

Categories
Philosophy

Some days…

…some days, I’d like to just gather up all the tyrants, the warlords and the dictators and seal them in a glass sphere before launching it across the event horizon of a black hole. Beyond the staggering complexity and as yet non-existent infrastructure for such an arguably defensible act, it remains as a conceptually simple […]

Categories
Philosophy

Engaging the Riots and Violence in France

So, I’ll just leave this here: Yes, violence is NEVER the solution in these circumstances and wildfire complexities. The problem of juridico-political and/or racial and cultural inequity is one to which systems of governance classically apply linear solutions, quite unwittingly reinstituted g the matrix sacristan of self-propagating socio-affective turbulence. It is a poorly-managed problem and […]

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 […]