Fear to speak our mind tends to stifle and suffocate good ideas and give bad ideas and wilful ignorance free rein. It is also worth mentioning that bad ideas have an unfortunate tendency to self-replicate much faster than good ones. The only real solace here being that when there are many bad ideas in play, […]
That our failures and our successes are intimately entangled applies as much at nascent planetary technological civilisation level as at any other. Interesting, also, to conjecture that our greatest failures (in microcosm and at scale) are generally in and of a partisan adversarialism that as reflexive psychological and existential compulsion cycles and oscillates through this […]
There was a mystical thread of thought in medieval philosophy called “apophasis”. This is an “un-saying” and reductive process of abstraction and recursively self-inflected introspection that may arrive at a goal of finding whatever is left after everything else is removed – God, enlightenment, essence, reality, certainty, truth; take your pick. Of course, we find […]
…and yet the persistent absence of intellectual creativity is a necessary condition for its acquired significance and perceived value. A principle of scarcity in economics resonates. That said, I’m not certain that the boundary conditions between intellectual theft and ethical practice in any autonomously self-propagating sociotechnical (information) system has been, or perhaps ever could be, […]
Unable to focus on singular topics or projects for very long, was Leonardo da Vinci an embodiment of innovation as a specialist generalist for the information age, 500 years too early; or, was an information and technology revolution 500 years too late? Beyond wistful anecdotes and instructive historical vignettes, it is useful to consider that […]
Context: How quantum security generates randomness to shield IoT systems It strikes me as equal parts interesting and enigmatic that the implicit uncertainty of an abstraction (and extraction) of entropy as randomness upon which we must build our certainties of assurance in information security indicates a profoundly mischievous and rarely, if ever, acknowledged ontological fact. […]
Innovation as a concept is (still) quite poorly understood. While instances of innovation are critically significant, the general abstraction of which those instances are manifestations remains somewhat opaque. There is a class of logical systems constructs that mine a rich seam of conceptual innovation. These derive from the recursive (logical) properties of system self-containment. This […]
Cicero: “exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis”.(The exception that proves the rule). Context: The chaos theory of word creation Interesting etymologies coursing as arcs from quarks through stochastic serendipity into literature and beyond but then most etymology is found fascinating to reflective minds. Neologisms are the recursive concatenation and hybrid juxtaposition of pre-existing symbol […]
Creativity is indeed a sign or marker of intelligence. There are many kinds of intelligence, though, and creative intelligence is as often shunned as celebrated. This represents something of an intractable enigma: the creative insights upon which innovation, technological metamorphosis and revelatory insight so foundationally depend simultaneously represent something of a psychological challenge and existential […]
Swimming against the stream and powerful tides of conventional thought and behavioural orthodoxy is the only way to ever do anything of enduring value or significance in life. It is also the hardest life to live. Authenticity and sincerity or conscientious adherence to your own values will cost you more in suffering and hardship than […]
Monocultural or ideological hegemony in organisational leadership is a recipe for disaster. As a general observation, when organisational systems fall into overtly biased configurations and power symmetries, it is rarely a consequence of willful misdirection. From the interior surface of a half-mirrored labyrinth of self-validating justification and institutional logic, this kind of monocultural percolation may […]
How curious that at precisely the (Anthropocene) moment in which the living biosphere and almost all of its diverse inhabitants find themselves threatened or constrained and diminished apace, we produce replicas and robotic golems that quite dramatically dissimulate that they do not in fact possess that life or indefinable (unprovable, logically) living fact that we […]
Daedelus Kite 