Categories
literature

Mnemosyne

Mnemosyne, the Titaness of Memory, stands as one of the most profound figures in Greek mythology, embodying the living thread of memory that weaves the past into the present and propels it into the future. She is the daughter of Uranus (Sky) and Gaia (Earth), representing a primordial force whose power shapes not only individual […]

Categories
Philosophy

Consolation

The consolation of philosophy lies in that language allows us to adaptively reinterpret a commonly (as historically) inequitable and unnecessarily adversarial world as hopeful, meaningful and just. A (related) tragedy of communicative dissonance and conflict seems to be that it is precisely the most competitively frictive and absurdly futile of narratives that tend to percolate […]

Categories
Philosophy

Engaging the Riots and Violence in France

So, I’ll just leave this here: Yes, violence is NEVER the solution in these circumstances and wildfire complexities. The problem of juridico-political and/or racial and cultural inequity is one to which systems of governance classically apply linear solutions, quite unwittingly reinstituted g the matrix sacristan of self-propagating socio-affective turbulence. It is a poorly-managed problem and […]

Categories
freedom

On the Freedom of Women in Iran

The essence of all totalitarian regimes is that of the brutal oppression of their own people by any and all possible methods. The violent oppression of women in particular has a leading place in this current litany of relentless attrocities. The Iranian regime is grounded in and sustained by its pathological obsession with the control […]

Categories
technology

Biased AI & Inequitable Algorithmic Justice

Context: Can you make AI fairer than a judge? Play our courtroom algorithm game Bias in AI only ever really focuses and amplifies existing inequality as a function and retrospective, combinatorial abbreviation of historical data. This itself is no great or new revelation: we generate automated decision-making systems that recursively reinforce aggregate cultural dependencies and […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Healing America: not so simple…

A key problem: information and communication systems autonomously self-replicate by optimally-concise pattern encoding methods as an extended consequence of the orientation towards low-energy states. No surprise there, perhaps, for anyone versed in complexity theory but the problem is not necessarily the intractable antitheses by binary poles in this endless partisan argument so much as the […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

History is Only what is Left after Everything else is Forgotten

It is interesting to note that history, as a symbolic abstraction, must perhaps (and necessarily) constitute the aggregate sum of all aspirationally least-incorrect assumptions, mnemonics, cartographies and narrative conveniences.  The path through any forest can be as popular, arbitrary or random as you would prefer to choose and while we might consider it as an […]

Categories
Philosophy

Homelesness: a “Wicked Problem” of Complexity

Why does homelessness occur and why is it so difficult to find and apply lasting solutions? In a nutshell: Entropy. This is not a rhetorical affectation but as an authentic explanatory and causal explanation. Many socioeconomic problems are complex but within a relatively limited problem “dimensionality” – consider crowd control or public transport. They are […]

Categories
Philosophy

Countering the Inordinate Power of the Big Technology Companies

Corporate power in the technology domain is a complex cartography but it is not indecipherable. It takes intelligence and subtlety to address the problem of autonomously self-propagating information systems that have grown too large, too fast and in all of this speed and runaway self-replication represent something of an atavistic return to a state of accelerated reproduction which in cells occurs in (or as) cancer.

Categories
politics

There is no perfect social system

Just as there may never be any isolated closure and teleological endpoint to logic, physics and mathematics – there can also never be any such thing as the “one true way” or ideological and social perfection. There are only successive approximations and iterative algorithmic refinements towards a better world, without end.

Categories
culture

On Algorithms as against Exceptionalism

Will the enthusiastic cultural and economic act of handing our collective destinies over to an overt and arbitrary algorithmic logic lead to a gradual (or rapid) and self-propagating bias towards “flattening out” of outliers, eccentrics, and authentic innovation ?