Categories
Philosophy

Science and Logic versus Belief and Climate Change Denial: Duelling Uncertainties?

Context: ‘God intended it as a disposable planet’: meet the US pastor preaching climate change denial Notice how the frame of reference represented by this (or for that matter – any) belief system is so easily detached from the reality and unassailable facts upon which it actually and constitutively depends for sustainable continuity and existence. Systems […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Necessity of Self-Deception

We are always and already primed, cultivated and prepared by those cultural information systems we inhabit to possess some primitive – but essential – form of self-deception. There is a necessary blind-spot in self-identity that very much forms the core around which that aspirational bundle of ambiguities, uncertainties and insecurities we identify as Self is […]

Categories
Philosophy

There are other forms of life…

The truth, or at least a truth, is that the systems that we recognise as life or living are only really a sub-set of a much larger and distributed range or spectrum of entities and artefacts. Where we assert significance to the overtly and materially self-contained aspects of any particular living system, this is as […]

Categories
communication

How Disinformation Works

The old Nietzschean idiom about the abyss staring back seems apt here – as we gaze into an abyss of political chaos, partisan insecurity, confusion and intractable information complexity. This is precisely what is being done in the US right now through externally (and internally) sourced disinformation. Notice that, agnostic of truth-value, distributed patterns of […]

Categories
Psychology

Information Bubbles

Observing some of the unfolding confrontations and adversarial self-definitions across these social media spaces we all now inhabit, even if indirectly bearing the burden of their consequences, I really have to wonder sometimes, not if the world can still be saved from its own erstwhile immaturity and wilful ignorance but if it is even worth […]

Categories
technology

Countering Influence Operations: An Enigma?

Context: Facebook: Recommended Principles for Regulation or Legislation to Combat Influence Operations It is a fascinating issue. I suggest that the complexity of the problem far outstrips these assertions of interdiction and oversight. We have seen pretty much the same thing happen in cyber security. Where a property or quality, if not the actual content, […]

Categories
Philosophy

Technology: The Great Unmaking

We barely even notice as all this technology sweeps us away, transforms us. The greatest enigma of all is that the more we identify our Self in, through and as this technological hyper-extension of our own minds and bodies – the less we become. Only the greatest of strategists could ever mask their own existence […]

Categories
Philosophy

Welcome to the Machine

It is a tesseract. Every action, thought, word, gesture, sentence, idiom, emoticon and (yes, every) blog post – it’s all part of the hyper-inflating information space(s) we inhabit. Posting introspectively back into this maelstrom is perfectly, eminently sensible and is a reflex we all acquire as certainly and surely as breathing. The thing I think […]

Categories
Philosophy

How does art acquire value?

To ask how does art acquire value is really no different than asking how art (or anything at all) acquires meaning, as both concepts are significantly more hollow than any of us are commonly willing to admit into consideration. Art itself is the reflexive recombination of (existing, pre-existing) idioms, concepts, images and narrative (cultural) threads. […]

Categories
communication

Censorship is a Broken Gambit

As an observer of media and communications systems in regards to oversight, constraint and psychological, cultural or ideological aspirations to control and manipulate, there is a curious enigma and blind-spot in all attempts to surveillance as a method of control. That is, specifically, that asserting prohibition and censorship is only ever superficially able to provide […]

Categories
information

Disinformation Tesseract

Disinformation is a mirrored labyrinth that no one can escape, but escaping – like truth – was never really the most important thing. A point worth noting is: these technologically-mediated information systems possess characteristics of what is known as “emergent complexity”. The form and flow of information and energy across (and as) these systems leverage […]

Categories
information

Information Wildfire

Viewed in gestalt from a holistic perspective, information systems are naturally predisposed to moving through the combinatorial possibility-spaces of entropy into dissonant states. The question is as to whether that dissonance represents a literal sociopolitical or interpersonal turbulence and concrete representation of lost and unrecoverable (i.e. adversarial, belligerently futile) information or energy-processing potential, OR, if […]