Everyone knows a dickhead. The interesting question is why the conditions that generate them do so, enduringly, and with such uncanny frequency.
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A Theory of Dickheads
Tag: narcissism
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Extreme Wealth
Extreme wealth simplifies the world around it, not by insight but by attraction. Certain ideas adhere because they are easy to recognise, easy to repeat, and easy to circulate. They fit branding, reward loyalty, and move smoothly through systems that privilege speed over reflection. In this way an ideological frame consolidates, not because it is […]
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Ascendant Narcissism
The uncanny frequency with which narcissists percolate into positions of power is a function of the ways that the Rube Goldberg tesseract of ascendant organisational ecologies acquire an emergent orientation towards the self-selection of complementary, resonant character types. This is to say: there exists something of a distributed pathological bias for self-selecting personality traits that […]
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Mass Hysteria and Social Media
Mass hysteria in the age of social media is not any kind of an exception, it is the rule. The endless tesseracts of obsessively narcissistic taxidermy in filtered montage of body and culture may once have adorned our walls and our family photo albums but now populate our mobile devices, our cultures and our #imagination. […]
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Civilisation Autopilot
We do not pilot this vehicle of civilisation anywhere near so much as it pilots us and it is as a relatively unremarkable consequence of human vanity that we remain on the whole almost entirely unable to perceive this.
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Instagrammatical Narcissism
Instagram is – at base – narcissism, self-obsession, insecurity, pathological inadequacy and the normative, technologically-mediated ubiquity of endless self-surveillance as peer-group pressure on steroids. It’s probably offensive for some people to hear these analytical assessments but, really, that’s ok – it is a part of a core psychological narcissism that the confrontation with and of […]
The bourgeoisie does indeed suck but they are not the only corpulent vampyres in this (all too) human game of parasitic symbiosis; every political system has them – they just tend to wear different masks. Underneath, they are all the same: bloated, selfish, cruel. Which bourgeoisie? The middle class, the capitalist class, the class of […]
Instagram, a virtual wonderland of beautiful faces and spontaneously zany lifestyles, creative activity and the broad spectrum of human positivity. A strange place, in many ways – not because all of these pastimes are particularly pointless or hollow – but because, even while the Global pandemic stalks us all and threatens to forever change this […]
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An Organisational Uncanny Valley
The entities and artefacts we make “in our own image” include the abstractions and patterns through which we understand and organise the world and ourselves.
A good dose of humility is required to allow humanity sufficient and plausible opportunities to continue to exist. We are everywhere beset by distraction and psychological confusion as to our significance and purpose…
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On Introspection (as Reality)
Introspection is endless and is for all this – endlessly problematic.
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Digital Legacy
Your digital legacy will be all those recorded-as-binary-data artefacts, ideas, opinions and ripples-of-influence you leave behind in your wake and that after your passing will form some turbulent impression upon this shadowy, shared virtual space. It’s unlikely that through our online activities any of us will make much of an impact on the path the […]
Daedelus Kite 