Recent studies reveal that the COVID-19 pandemic period has been the quietest period of human activity in the seismic record. It makes you wonder about the cumulative background noise that human activity generates as a constant vibrational hum of socioeconomic activity across the crust and into the subsurface body of the Earth. In what ways […]
Pandemic metamorphosis is upon us all and among all the darkness and tragedy there will be new life. Patterns of behaviour carry us, much as does language, in many ways much more than we could ever carry, possess or assert control over them and regardless of these fragile egos we are all compelled (as Subjects […]
Meanwhile, the pandemic is starting to take off (again) here in Australia, spreading rapidly… …history is always implicitly interesting but is generally best seen from a safe distance.
Context: Why do we ignore catastrophic risk? It may just be that some entities, artefacts, events or (other) possibilities are so vast and so horrifying that they all but entirely invalidate the limited linguistic or cognitive referential frame(s) of this comforting little semiotic cocoon of complex tautologies and half-mirrored surfaces within which we (all) live. […]
Context: The Covid-19 Catastrophe; Covid-19: The Pandemic That Never Should Have Happened – review An interesting article, skimmed, but honestly – we shouldn’t waste excess quantities of spilled ink or time on what is really quite a simple problem. That is: the grammars, games and mechanisms of political selection and government installation of and for […]
Perhaps “the centre cannot hold” because there is no centre. Chaos and disorder are far more the native state of material (thermodynamic, dissipative) facts than are the projected order and control around which we reflexively and aspirationally self-validate. Curious, indeed, (and under one perspective) that everything emerging out of the complexity sciences suggests that it […]
Context: Pandemic Makes Evident ‘Grotesque’ Gender Inequality In Household Work No surprise, then, that undergoing traumatic paroxysms of existential stress in this pandemic has caused all those unacknowledged (and yet – hardly unknown) faultlines and inequitable socioeconomic discontinuities to percolate into awareness; cultural artefacts like some neurotic’s once poorly-masked behavioural anachronisms, endlessly and problematically oscillating […]
Context: Coronavirus murals: inside the world of pandemic-inspired street art Interesting to consider the ways in which popular culture embodies a communication medium for an inadvertent yet optimally-concise and autonomously self-propagating information pattern of ourselves, our minds and the hyper-extended cognition of (an ancient, symbolic language of) technological self-representation. The article could have done with a few more […]
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 […]
The form and flow of culture forms in no small measure the persistent expression of an introspective neurosis. The abstractions of convention, of time and place are small and hollow. A thousand years from now, everything we now hold to be self-evident will be unveiled as rank absurdity but taboo will, like the ball being […]
Uncertainty (and it’s irreducible twin shadows of proliferating information and entropy) represents an implicit logical discontinuity in, and of, information systems. This is the central abstract artefact around which complex systems self-gravitate, accelerate, self-replicate and autonomously self-propagate in, through, and as internal system structure and environmental information and energy flows. This recursive entanglement and adaptive […]
During this shared Global challenge that is the COVID-19 pandemic and now – much more than ever before – the internet is our critical information lifeline and tether to the world. How well is the internet coping with such a sudden and massive hyper-inflation of demand? The internet of popular imagination is an omnipresent amorphous […]
