Categories
Philosophy

Endless Crises of Political Failure

Interesting to note, perhaps, that many if not most (although not necessarily all) political, ideological and/or strategic designs have an inadvertent – arguably unconscious – bias towards generating precisely the kinds of errors that optimally reproduce and self-validate themselves. The ways in which this error-encoding occurs and the sophistication with which it is engaged is […]

Categories
politics

Beyond Ideology

Indeed, and similarly – the metric and ticking metronome of those times is so often and deeply inflected by a chronology (as history) measured in, by and as reflexive institutional responses to human being that we have all come to quite normatively expect that all of our catastrophes and our triumphs must necessarily conform to […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Fear of technological change: AI

Context: How do you build trust in new technologies? An arguably irreducible factor in this is that cultural, linguistic and (corollary) cognitive systems thrive where and when there is a threshold of uncertainty and doubt. Personal (or national) identities – for instance – are never so certain in their dissimulated security as when they are […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Hollow Men: Global Institutional Failures

The questions being asked and the problems being solved across government, industry and the community are almost entirely superficial and beyond the general effervescence of hype and rapidly-fading excitement or media and popular interest, the institutional processes and behavioural practices we inhabit have become self-validating rationales. We do not possess any such thing as a […]

Categories
Philosophy

Where have all the Big Ideas gone?

Global problems require Global solutions but a unified approach to shared problems is nothing if not conspicuous by its absence. Key issues here are that ineffective solutions supporting and cultivating piecemeal or reductive and iterative engagement with such complex, distributed problems are the primary artefacts and policy idioms that tend to percolate to ascendancy through […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Pandemic: a world under siege

The generalised abstractions of partisan-political, ideological and economic self-interest are able to thrive in dissonant disunity. It is an environment that these abstractions themselves generate and that manifests the context and medium through which they most efficiently and effectively self-replicate. This is, among other things, precisely why the world has ever and always been a […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Arms Race in Space: Governance of Technology or Technology of Governance?

I fear that the introduction of rules, prescriptive boundaries and frameworks will not inhibit the militarisation of this context so much as positively incentivise it, the culture and history of adversarial psychology being what it is.  A line must certainly be drawn in the sand, but it seems that most of these (kinds of) prohibitions […]

Categories
technology

Cyber Security and Governance: to Centralise or not to Centralise?

Cyber security is a fascinating and rapidly evolving problem-space. What possible solutions exist in regards to coordinated governance and oversight? If a centralised software and hardware development methodology iss used – compliance to formal standards could be assured but the (logically and materially inevitable) emergence of vulnerability and exploit would mean that this systemic coherence […]

Categories
culture

Evolving Organisational and Conceptual Systems

A fascinating feature of contemporary organisational systems, and at all scales of magnitude, is the various ways in which they subscribe to a simplistic mechanical and linear model of ontology and operation. It is as though, while everyone and everywhere is more than happy to commercially and politically exploit the Post-Newtonian and Post-Industrial Revolution technologies […]

Categories
environment Philosophy

Enigmas of Ecological Problem-Solving

The non-linear cognitive flexibility and diverse conceptual vocabulary required to describe the complex problem-space of environmental and ecological complexity is also the heuristic practise with which we might seek to successfully address it.

Categories
culture politics systems

On Facts, Truth and Public Narratives

You could be mistaken for believing that the primary public narratives and political engagements of our era are dominated by simpletons and misanthropes…

Categories
culture politics systems

Trumping conspiracy: On NOT Turning History into toilet paper…

A national Executive unfurling inarticulate and episodic errors of judgement and failures of intelligence like ragged, torn and soiled toilet paper across history’s grand cartography…