When the brute force of simple narratives overwhelms complexity, you see analysis and ethics crushed by scale. That is the moment you start to doubt purpose on this fragile, beautiful planet. Political chaos feels pre-scripted; people pivot their morals with alarming speed when pressure rises, and it’s hard to believe it was ever different. Riding […]
The atmosphere of American politics now resembles a dense fog of ideological noise. What registers as outrage, conviction or disgust is less the product of reasoned belief than the mechanics of replication: the simplest, most virulent signals race ahead of nuance. Words once tethered to meaning drift as tokens in a saturated field, their resonance […]
Sometimes, when people look at me and speak, I don’t hear the words—I see the mouth moving and hear the noise, nothing more. It feels like those moments when a familiar word suddenly turns strange, hollowed of meaning, its surface exposed. I think this happens to all of us: every so often, language reveals itself […]
Any sufficiently sophisticated analysis of language, technology, and or communication eventually arrives at a point in which human behavioural, psychological and/or political experience is really only rationally explicable as noise, and it’s simply the noise that self-propagates most effectively that acquires and sustains meaning.
The rise of rigid ideology is a reciprocal function of the simplicity of the language with which it embellishes itself. This is not a moral judgement, nor an apologetic for autocracy, but a statistical inevitability: simplicity wins because simplicity persists. Such narratives are not the only dynamics at work, but they gain disproportionate attention. Words […]
What, exactly, does excruciatingly monocultural generative content tell us? While satire and parody acquire significance as a function of their grounding in the consensus reality of whichever time and place they reflect, and given that sum combinatorial complexity of interdependent cultural systems is incommensurable with any bounding measures or methods and “intelligent” machines we currently […]
This is, among other things, a relatively succinct description of the (current, Global) communications system drift through combinatorial entropy into the more probable states of relatively meaningless yet optimally reconfigurable (as modular) noise. High frequency, low fidelity narrative artifacts (and all who sail in them) don’t become completely meaningless signals, but they come to share […]
(My own) unnecessarily grandiose and/or unsubstantiated generalisations notwithstanding, the effervescing efflorescence of meaningless communications system noise is a core function and mechanism of sociotechnical self-regulation at the “global”, Gestalt or planetary civilisation scale. An ocean of entropy and dissipative recombinatorial turbulence self-validates the organisational teleologies, such as they are, that already exist. The primary mechanism […]
Despite being quite well suited by geography and economy to weather the pandemic, it seems the inevitable has happened and – part epidemiological entropy, part selfish human stupidity, part bad luck – COVID-19 has gained a foothold again here in Australia. Every morning and several times a day I check the news media online to […]
Daedelus Kite 