Categories
Alien Anthropology

Metaverse Mortgages: The Absurdity of (Virtual) Value

Oh yes, mortgages are now a thing in the Metaverse. There is something really interesting here, from a speculative philosophical and psychotherapeutic perspective. Some people are quite willing and enthusiastic to jump on the bandwagon of perceived or projected value in and as virtual artefacts, entities and systems. This is plausibly because at a reflexive […]

Categories
environment

Jeff Bezos’ Environmental Philanthropy

Context: COP26: Bezos pledges $2bn for restoring nature Yes, thanks Jeff, but it is likely going to cost several orders of magnitude more than that to even begin to effect substantive systemic change. It is something of an unresolvable existential irony that it is precisely the system(s) of value and wealth that we so viscerally […]

Categories
Philosophy

Money

Money is a tool, not an end in itself and the sooner we recognise this, the happier we will all be. We assert intrinsic value to things which possess no ultimate value beyond that which they acquire in the process of asserting it. Beyond this superficially stultifying tautological bootstrap of monetary self-significance, a sufficiently mature […]

Categories
Philosophy

Priceless Beauty

Not all beauty has a cost. It is the things, people and places which do not have any associated, attributed monetary measurement of worth that are the most valuable. This is why we are all, in general, so unhappy – we place value in altogether the wrong things. We spend our lives chasing meaningless token […]

Categories
business

Turning a profit from loneliness…

Turning a profit from loneliness through the promise and perfect fantasy of attention, loving gratitude and intimacy from beautiful people is the essence of all entertainment, all media and – if we’re to be particularly honest about the underlying psychological symmetries – of all business, all politics and all ideology.

Categories
Philosophy

Success: The Game Plays You

What we all generally fail to realise is that even while it is true that any one of us can never hope to achieve anything without sustained effort, the extent to which each and every one of us is subject to the blind and unknowing clockwork patterns and algorithmic necessities of mathematical probability and (an […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Was Capitalism Inevitable?

An interesting question is as to the inevitability of capitalism – or something very much like it – in any hyper-inflating socioeconomic (and by extension, geopolitical) referential space. That is to say: are there senses in which the natural bias towards autonomously self-optimising information and energy-processing systems – as manifest through and as human civilisation(s) […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Money

Money is the crux of our shared existential crisis – and yes, regardless of the extent to which you are willing or able to admit this: it is a crisis, it is ongoing and it is the status of any adaptive system that is subject to an evolving momentum through entropy towards complexity. We store […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Climate Change and the Downward Spiral of Greed

The more we reflexively structure, cultivate and sediment our cultural identities, psychological subjectivity and civilisation around (and through) a limiting grammar and vocabulary of runaway greed, the more we find ourselves trapped in a spiral of accelerating entropy. Context: Thomas Keneally’s 2020s vision: We must abandon the language of the market to reclaim our humanity

Categories
Philosophy

Fire Fighting: Extinguishing Self

This world of inflated, tangled emptiness is the world we have together made and together we will watch as it actively disassembles itself. The mysterious and unknowable vacuum beyond knowledge is essentially the same logical entity as is the foundational void within it. Epistemological certainty and self-identity or self-knowledge are limited by the same essential […]

Categories
money

Financial Physics: Entropy, Gravitation, Complexity

The proliferating, bubbling, effervescent diffusion of information abstractions in (and as) cultural and economic – ergo financial – systems nowhere reveals itself as so much smoke and mirrors than, ironically, where it assumes such literal gravity and influence over our lives and experience. I am fascinated by the autonomous methods and optimal functions of system […]

Categories
culture

Climate Inaction: Let the Bumbling Begin

Never mind that the sum-total of all available evidence is so profound that the only plausible chance anyone has of not believing that Climate Change is upon us is to either be so naive or so maliciously ignorant that it is impossible to admit this fact into their personal conceptual vocabulary and interpretive framework of […]