Context: How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation There’s the rub. Not only do complex information and communication networks optimally self-propagate through the autonomous cultivation of threshold levels of dissonance, error and what amounts here to a nurtured “fidelity drift”, commercial and existential (corporate) incentives in this context are quite natively oriented towards it. The […]
At a relatively recent “reunion” event, I noticed that the primary social process with which people were engaged was the negotiation and confirmation of facts, measurements, names, identities and dates. They were all, in essence, reconstructing a network graph of personal histories as effective coordinate systems by and through which to render their shared experience […]
Context: Why is quantum theory so strange? The weirdness could be in our heads The disconnect between experience and the counter-intuitive products of (a) material logic is endemic to cognition and it is, in essence, an irreducible discontinuity. It may change form as theory and popular narratives of science co-evolve but the foundational peculiarity and […]
Not so much listening to as hearing a neighbour’s car stereo droning out a persistent rhythmic baseline this afternoon provides room for reflection. It occurs to me how such assertions of public identity, of enthusiastically announcing a place in whichever cultural coordinate space we might choose or otherwise find ourselves inhabiting, there is a certain […]
This, from the book above: (…)art functions, in essence, to “creat[e] the void and thereby introduce[e] the possibility of filling it.” Staging Nothing: The Figure of Das Ding in Poe’s “The Raven”, Sean J. Kelly, in Psychology in Edgar Allan Poe, Logos Verlag Berlin, 2019, p. 69 Replace “void” with “subjectivity” and you have a […]
It’s quite unpalatable but is also true that for the overwhelming majority of us, access to the means of digital self-expression remains inversely proportional to either our reach or effect upon others and the world at large. Subsequently, almost all of our heartfelt longings, witty aphorisms or philosophical insights and literary anecdotes are bound to […]
Why ideology? Partisan individuation is (an) optimal method by which sociocultural (and technological) systems autonomously self-propagate, through and as us. A threshold level of entropy is constructively reintroduced back into the system as noise that invokes adaptive resilience in and as the distributed information pattern encoding across the entire “surface” of an integrated system of […]
Psychological and cultural systems of thought, language and belief that promote and nurture a core, selfish egocentrism are simultaneously the most fragile and prone to rapid, irreversible and catastrophic disassembly. There is much to be said here for the overtly pathological aspects of psychological self-identity that become encoded, validated, rewarded and celebrated as orthodox or […]
“Nothing is built on stone; All is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.” – Jorge Luis Borges How true, and yet the solution to this enigma is not to entirely disassemble or invalidate the riddle but (quite counter-intuitively) to embrace it. While it is true that no rational […]
It is an unacknowledged truth that subjective self-identity is always and already a psychological artefact that exists upon a sliding scale of graduated pathology. A notionally healthy or well-adjusted individual in comparison to a person experiencing some form of dissociative or discontinuous psychological reality represents a difference in degree but not in kind. That is […]
It’s a curious thing, this life. So many chance meetings and threaded destinies as a sophisticated tapestry of interdependent artefacts, entities and systems – all seeking self-expression and sustainable continuity while at same time and for the most part deeply, profoundly and reflexively afraid or wilfully unreceptive to the fact that none of us are […]
An introspective taxonomy of labels and the grammatical order of participatory technology in – and as – systems of knowledge and control has always been the nature, kernel and subjective essence of personal identity. It is difficult to identify a particular inflection point at which this Linnean, categorical game evolved from constructive personal boundary and […]
Daedelus Kite 