The more that our inner worlds become outer artefacts, the more that our personal lives (now - thoughts) becomes commercial or surveillance data points, the more that the porous boundaries of psychological and material subjectivity disassemble and dissolve. A history, a culture, a civilisation predicated upon the ascendance of individuality (and it's logical complement of…
Worthless Chemistry and Orchid Dust
Fashion wears us more than we could ever be said to wear it; we only have these experiences and ideas in direct and reflexive proportion to the extent that they, in fact, have us. We do not search for meaning - it searches for us and there, finding us as so many yawning vacuums and…
The Gospel of Emptiness
Our images, our Self- or Other-portraits and all of our representational fantasies are always subtle dissimulations of a projected, doubly-inflected Self that we only ever feel that we need to cultivate - (in ourselves as much as in others), to construct, because it is precisely what is expected of us, what everyone else "does" (or…
On Writing
All writing is experimentation. Hemingway suggested that there is no good (first draft) writing, that all the quality emerges from rewriting and while I do not doubt that there is wisdom in this - I find that words flow most smoothly as though of their own accord; the essence of an idea, a concept, an…
Economics, Psychology, Philosophy and our Shared Selves
There is a certain childish wish-fulfilment in many ideological, economic and political descriptions (and their associated, self-inflected, experience) of reality. This is a simplicity sought in an order and a taxonomy or categorical differentiation, difference and the abstract "distance" of Other(ing) which seeks to impose structure where there rarely is any. Or at least there…
Zen, Climate and Love: Disassembling a Fallacy of Difference
Zen is to utterly deconstruct, disassemble and reconceptualise Self and Mind. It is difficult medicine but the mischievous enigma at the core of all of our problems is our Self. Decentralised psychological subjectivity and cultural presence is one in which adversarial competition is dissolved as there is no foundational differentiation between persons, property or places.Utopias,…
Online Communication: Talking Underwater
All of this online communication really feels a bit like trying to talk (or shout) underwater; no one can hear us and no one is really listening or paying attention anyway. The greatest misdirection and deception of this is that while we are (all) here pouring our hearts and minds out into this digital information…
A Cultural Vacuum of Self
The strangest thing about personal identity and subjective psychological experience is that, at core, it consists solely of internalised references to an external world of images, ideas, idioms, languages and conventions. This "external" world is only ever the substantive collection and dynamic aggregate of all of those other individual nodes, similarly empty, and swimming in…
Information Age: Influence and Deception, the Omnipresence of Conflict
A game of information, influence and seeded (or targeted) turbulence is unlikely to be winnable (or won) by reproducing and reinforcing the structural, organisational components that merely reproduce and self-validate the axioms, grammars and rules of that game. These games are won by rewriting the rules; by extending an existing grammar and logical framework in…
Should We Stop Making Stupid People Famous ?
There is a well-known meme which features a photograph of a notoriously unintelligent celebrity - take your pick, there are certainly plenty to choose from - with the accompanying text: "stop making stupid people famous." The thing is - stupid people might actually be the perfect candidates for celebrity. These lucky (or - if we…
Encoding Culture, Encrypting Identity
Conjecture: We are encoding culture but we are encrypting identity. It is not well-understood - partially because those procedural mechanisms and autonomously self-propagating waveforms (or functions) of patterned information that manifest as, in and through ourselves must also protect themselves and their own aspirational continuity. If it were immediately apparent how mental worlds and cultural…
The Temptation of Anonymity
The temptation of anonymity (in an age of relentlessly depersonalising self-expression) is to not commit a record of one's own living trajectory into the biosphere and information networks of our era. It is of course a fallacy and rank impossibility - there is no identity camouflage or stealth technology. Self-identity was always a matter of…
