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…
The Coronavirus Blues
A few weeks (is it two, or three, now?) into isolation and social distancing, it is all starting to get a bit depressing. Never being anything much of a social butterfly at the best of times, I still feel a visceral burden of dread and anxiety mounting, an overwhelming sense of dread and emptiness. There…
Social Distancing
...and in all of our isolation, our distant alienation from all the life we once knew, when all social contact and that intimacy or literal warmth of another's presence and friendship has become a silent vacuum of absence - what do we have left? We have our empty, listless lives and the dawning awareness that…
Event Horizon: Life and Death
Entering into life is always and ever to pass across an event horizon towards a dark infinity; all futures, freedom and choice trace an inevitable arc and trajectory towards singularity and extinction. Entropy provides limited degrees of freedom or choice but teleology binds us.
Pandemic: a world under siege
The generalised abstractions of partisan-political, ideological and economic self-interest are able to thrive in dissonant disunity. It is an environment that these abstractions themselves generate and that manifests the context and medium through which they most efficiently and effectively self-replicate. This is, among other things, precisely why the world has ever and always been a…
What is Entropy?
Well, among other things... Entropy is a measure of the "degrees of freedom" available to a system. Generally-speaking, the more components, sub-systems, artefacts, entities that compose a system - the more degrees of freedom that are available to that system. Because there are always more possible disordered system states than ordered ones (in the total…
The Storm is upon us all…
There is a deepening feeling of doom (and gloom) as coronavirus begins to take hold across our community. We see the numbers growing daily; accelerating, exponentiating. At some point this will no longer be "someone else's" illness, it will be upon us; a tidal surge of trillions of sinister nano-scale biological robots, wicked ribonucleic algorithms…
Crown of Thorns: this gathering storm
This nauseating fear and gathering storm, the manifestation of an unacknowledged, unknown horror: our bodies were never impermeable, our minds - never infallible. The juggling, shuffling and dancing patterns of information and entropy from which we emerged - these were never some distant Otherness and isolated (or tamed) danger and threat of difference, of distance.…
It’s the end of the world as we know it…
https://youtu.be/8OyBtMPqpNY Zeitgeist.
Evolving Narratives and Cultural Behaviours to Negotiate a Global Pandemic
Sociality and interdependence is our species' strength but is simultaneously also our weakness. The complex networks and intangible feedback loops of behaviour, communication, material artefacts and technologies upon which we have built a Global civilisation, such as it is, are autonomously self-propagating information systems. Once such psychological, social and cultural systems have gained energy and…
Global Pandemic: Our Institutions have failed us
In our darkest hour, the breadth and depth of institutional insolvency unveils itself - as though we were not all already aware of the compound ethical, economic and intellectual bankruptcy of our era - and stands naked and useless like a balance sheet providing shelter from a storm.
COVID19 and Global Economic Devastation
Beyond the self-evident inadequacies of our integrated bureaucratic hierarchies, the labyrinth of systemic biases which have funneled wealth into corporate welfare and monopolistic hegemonies are now revealing their utter ineptitude at providing adequate socioeconomic resilience. You could ask why no one saw this coming. Many people did, they just did not know what shape or…
