Context: US Military Document Admits That Risk of Nuclear War Is Growing This article kind of ruined my Sunday, right there. The rank absurdity of nuclear war is astonishing. That the worlds and words built from effective abstractions of thought and the transient emotional affectations of partisan ideological difference could ever arrive in or at […]
Sunday morning brought this little documentary gem of existential anxiety to my digital doorstep: The future of modern warfare: How technology is transforming conflict. Long gone are the days when a newspaper delivery, thrown from a footpath and having missed its mark might shatter our living room window, allowing us the superficially satisfying retort of […]
“That’s all any of us are: amateurs. We don’t live long enough to be anything else.” Charlie Chaplin Amateurs indeed, and yet – as with so many things – we perceive not only the implicit limitations of our minds (and lives, collectively – of cultures and civilisation) but also intuit the significant persistence of doubt, […]
The twilight of my own aspirations to a peaceful and purposefully useful life on Earth appears to be the dawn of a new Global stupidity. It would be somewhat less distressing to witness a general dissolution and devolution into the flailing, lumbering madness of political and ideological conflict were it not that the buffoons who […]
Power is really an inverse function of ethics. What is considered permissible or (indeed) valuable under any moving ethical frame of reference is implicitly – some would argue necessarily – representative of the power structures, systems and integrated social, political and ideological modalities of a time and place. Notice also that what is considered good […]
Note: this was originally written as a response to a specific contemporary geostrategic context for an audience that was spectacularly uninterested in my opinion, so I share it here just to keep it in some modest sense “alive” as a bundle of ideas. I can’t help but wonder if the threat of war is itself […]
Anger almost always reveals an unconscious truth and as a general principle is an agnostic omnipresence across interpersonal and complex (intra- or inter-system) psychological and social dynamics. Extrapolating on this: the generation or cultivation of frictive behaviours or narratives forms the basis and constitutive self-validation of a largely and autonomously self-propagating neurosis. The pathology is […]
Good ideas sell themselves. It is only the bad ideas that need to be brute-forced upon a people that then, having been bludgeoned by repetition for so long, comes to believe that such incessant cruelty is the normal state of things. Human beings are really quite naturally amazing and despite their natural curiosity and native […]
Context: https://youtu.be/2Uj1A9AguFs Vertical motion in this chart is a measure of the degree to which any of the organisations or entities recursively and reflexively facilitates global information system self-replication. This is precisely how complex information-processing systems function: they autonomously self-select for those components, entities and sub-systems that optimally bias for the replication of the overall […]
It remains an unrelenting mystery and enigmatic fact that this world of ours is exquisitely well-tuned for producing precisely the wrong kind of complexity. This is to say that the technological and geopolitical trajectory that humanity on the whole feels compelled to create, reproduce or cultivate is quite clearly one of least optimal solutions of […]
Attempting to comprehensively explain the many and diverse ways in which information autonomously self-propagates as and through cognition, communication and culture is a subtle process. More often than not, such aspirations towards linguistic, mathematical (or other) conceptual closure devolve into meaningless noise that is only saved from complete irrelevance by that pattern-obsessed brains and sociotechnical […]
Context: http://www.politicalcompass.org This kind of test resonates with precisely the kind of personality assessments that Cambridge Analytica so successfully exploited. I’m not asserting that any inadvertent conspiratorial undercurrent exists in this instance but there may be (other) rich philosophical seams of insight to be mined here. Notice that an observational, participatory metric and expression of […]
Daedelus Kite 