In attempting to shape and influence the world through chaos and confusion, the Russian establishment and state media have themselves become both transmission medium and primary victims of these “active measures”. In trying to leverage and exploit lies, uncertainty and doubt – the totalitarian state has itself become the primary target and victim of these […]
The kleptocratic turn is in asendance, globally, but I dare say that the barren wasteland of abrogated responsibilities and catastrophic socioeconomic (not to mention humanitarian) outcomes is the most probable destination for any and all such totalitarian trajectories.
I remember a phrase from Marcus Aurelius in which he asserted that the worst thing a person could do is to make themselves and their lives a kind of blemish upon the world. I have been thinking about this in terms of Vladimir Putin. He is certainly inflicting great savagery and brutal abhorrence upon the […]
Context: The misinformation virus Systems of belief are without exception only ever aspirationally grounded upon the objects of their attention. It is as a function of endemic logical (as much as material or cognitive, cultural and communications system) extensibility that these systems become anchored as effective tautologies upon themselves. In this way they can adaptively […]
Language lies to us about its ability to facilitate communication. Anything beyond the most trivial of instances of description and communication carries enormous degrees of uncertainty and ambiguity. This is both the strength and the weakness of symbolic language, but ultimately – language itself benefits most. Human minds are bound by an acquired linguistic intuition […]
Finding myself endlessly questioning the reality of all that with which I am presented, two things become clear. First, that which is true can often appear as a lie but in most cases a lie will assert infallible truth and this is in itself a key differentiator and indicator of that which can or should […]
Beauty has two faces. One is the natural symmetry and resonant eloquence of the parts as they are manifest in and as a whole, of unified pattern and unity. The other is the abstraction and symbolic token of value and meaning that we cultivate (and inherit as culture) through language and tradition. The first is […]
Information, like entropy, is always created. When considered in gestalt: successful cultural, technological or socioeconomic systems (and their diverse artefacts or entities) are autonomously-oriented towards self-propagation as biological as much as material facts of information and energy-processing. One of the common errors we make when we engage the growing presence of both amateur and professionally-bespoke […]
Context: Facebook staffers walk out saying Trump’s posts should be reined in It is interesting to reflect that, shameless Executive bloviation notwithstanding, information and communications technologies from (for instance) Lascaux through emojis have never really been about truth and falsity so much as they have been about naked self-replication of the encoded system they bear. […]
Context: Busted: Pentagon Contractors’ Report on ‘Wuhan Lab’ Origins of Virus Is Bogus I would usually just slide past this kind of topic without commenting. However, as an artefact in a vigorously-contested information environment – an observation to be made here is that even a document of dubious veracity serves a useful purpose above and […]
Conspiracy theories are interesting, if for the most part demonstrably false. In the integrated information environment we live in, conspiracies are the little sisters of fake news but it is all on a colourful spectrum from plausible fiction to complete and utter bullshit.
You could be mistaken for believing that the primary public narratives and political engagements of our era are dominated by simpletons and misanthropes…
Daedelus Kite 