Categories
Philosophy

All the Simple Things

What is known (or is believed to be known) varies, adapts and undergoes the relentless metamorphosis of entangled streams of intersubjective abstraction we experience as cultural (and now, explicitly, technological) reality, but amongst all this effervescing percolation and uncertain intentions of identity and difference there remains a constant. The song, that is, remains the same […]

Categories
humanity

The Spiral of F̶e̶a̶r Peace

The spiral of accelerating attention upon aggressive events and negative consequences has a tendency to reproduce itself much faster than positive, neutral or ideologically and geopolitically inconsequential acts and facts. Human brains are, for better and for worse, more precisely refined and tuned to react to (and obsess upon) the terrible possibilities and through it, […]

Categories
technology

Elon Musk: Selling Utopian Technological Fantasies

Context: Elon Musk Insists on Autonowashing, Says Tesla Will License Autonomy to Anyone Commercial value is, perhaps, always a function of the difference(s) between aspiration and reality. Marketing as entrepreneurial exercise of relatively shameless self-promotion always and already presupposes the existence of some future state and well-polished (generally Utopian) fantasy upon which narrative (and prospective […]

Categories
communication

Fakes fly further and faster than facts…

The thing about lies and falsehoods or fakes and the aggregate self-deception of contemporary technologically-mediated information landscapes is that we generally fail to acknowledge that communication has never been primarily about truth. Communication serves first and foremost as a primary mechanism and transmission medium in and as which information systems optimally self-propagate and, as fakes […]

Categories
culture Philosophy

Comforting Repetition

Listening to radio news this morning, pondering the endless cycle of repetition-with-variation that constitutes the sporting events, politics, media fluff and assorted other sequential, temporal tokens of entertainment and news through which so many people measure and assert their collective tribal individuation and participatory self-determination, their subjective Self. It is all really so much emotional […]

Categories
Philosophy

Superficiality

Superficiality is a function of acceleration. The mainstream flow of technological complexity is such that not only is it quite possible to exist, survive and (indeed) thrive while doing little more than juggling labels, names, references and (other) abbreviations – this is the constitutive default mode of contemporary psychological and cultural experience. Complexity and comprehension […]

Categories
Philosophy

Facebook is Dangerous

Context: Facebook blocks Australian users from viewing or sharing news I have not used Facebook for years and it is not at all missed. It says a lot for just how rapidly and reflexively people come to depend on the integrated communications systems of “social networks” that the threat of removing access to algorithmically-shaped biases […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Perfect Selfie

The technology through which we measure, celebrate and cultivate our selves is simultaneously the blind-spot in our vision of that Self; this is as much a symptom of the technology as it is endemic of the introspective cultural and psychological process of self-definition. A technology of language and communication (or, really, any other art) has […]

Categories
culture

The Value of Controversy

Context: ‘It’s Going to Take a Long, Long Time.’ How the Uproar Over a Bollywood Lyric About Beyoncé Fits Into the Fight Against Colorism in India As Malcolm McLaren (as manager of the Sex Pistols) once noted – there is no such thing as bad publicity – he even cancelled performance to make the band […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Disinformation: Gullibility and Executive Malfunction

As a general observation: notice the many ways that psychological and ideological belief systems adopted and asserted by any particular person or tribe need have no particular anchor in reality. All belief systems possess this essentially tautological interior architecture of interdependent symbolic relationships which can so easily be entirely dissociated from demonstrable facts.  This is […]

Categories
art

The Burden of Shock

…and there we all are, withered and worn by the aggregate burden of pandemic catastrophe, political ineptitude and an endless stream of normative everyday entropy that, not only does the media present to us because this salience of shock value is the central bank of any currency of garnering attention, but which is inadvertently also […]

Categories
Philosophy

Digital Media: It was Never about Truth…

These information environments are biased towards the accelerated throughput and bandwidth of data, largely blind to truth values. The self-propagating gestalt of integrated digital information systems appear to require this constant throughput to avoid over-extension and self-gravitational collapse. It is something of a constant back-filling and hyper-inflating referential effervescence of naked data, sans semantics or […]