Errors of information encoding generate the novelty through and by which these cultural systems successfully self-propagate as continuity and change. Narrative dissonance is a necessary component of social communication; an autonomous method for introducing the useful information entropy of difference through which biological, cognitive and cultural systems evolve and maintain resilience against catastrophic disassembly. This…
Coronavirus, Dr. Li Wenliang and the Implicit Fragility of Authoritarian Political Regimes
While it is true that there is no such thing as a perfect political system, some forms of social organisation clearly possess greater resilience than others. This current epidemiological catastrophe is clear evidence of the implicit failures of authoritarian information control. https://twitter.com/howroute/status/1225480460979056642?s=09 The mechanical, austere logical function of authoritarian states generates deep fragility in their…
Brexit as a concept
To what extent can any nation (or ideology) ever successfully isolate itself without toxic consequence? Time's arrow of cultural, technological metamorphosis is defined by a progressive sedimentation of connectivity, network edges; everything else is atavistic wish-fulfilment.
Censorship, Entropy and Mephistopheles
As a general observation on censorship, redaction and purposeful obfuscation: Information Theory indicates the extent to which strings of symbols bear useful or valuable information and this is measured by the probabilistic entropy and literal surprise of that salience. An enigma of redaction is that, while the extraction of prominent or revealing features of narrative…
Internet Narratives, Self-propagating Complexity and Adversarial Evolution
Some philosophical thoughts on these contemporary, massively-distributed online communications systems:• social media now (largely) subsumes news media and the powerful, potentially unmanageable, flow and form of recursively self-propagating information-processing systems is such that even putatively reputable media or news channels - not to mention governments - are forced to contort themselves and their narratives in…
Climate Change In Security: Insecurity
It may be a matter of social and psychological necessity that this kind of monumental existential threat - to which we have perhaps long been desensitised by repetition and the droning monotony of unnecessarily adversarial ideological and political competition - carry more impact, more information entropy and cultural gravity when they become a tangible, material,…
Information Age: Influence and Deception, the Omnipresence of Conflict
A game of information, influence and seeded (or targeted) turbulence is unlikely to be winnable (or won) by reproducing and reinforcing the structural, organisational components that merely reproduce and self-validate the axioms, grammars and rules of that game. These games are won by rewriting the rules; by extending an existing grammar and logical framework in…
Friendly Fire: Politics, Philosophy
The politicians are very similar, in general, to the philosophers; they seek value and utility through finding new ways to divide, to separate, to objectify and to create both distance and difference in the world. This endless definition and referential inflation is of course nothing more than an introduction of more information, more complexity and…
Active Measures: information, physics, influence and censorship in cyberspace
It is interesting that active intervention, interdiction and an assertion of ideological self-interest through campaigns of enthusiastic (technologically-facilitated) censorship are probably the most expensive and least efficient ways of achieving information-centric goals. It is like attempting to cool a building by adding cold air - far more expensive in terms of energy, resources and information-processing…
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…
One Planet: a Smoke Signal in this Warming World
Every day, in the afternoon or early evening, for around 4 weeks a blanket of smoke has drifted across my city. I reflected on this here recently but tonight I found myself inadvertently caught up in the smoke as I was walking. My eyes are stinging, I have a sickening burnt wood taste in the…
Future of Work: Will AI create a Vocational Apocalypse?
What is perhaps most disturbing about the artival of autonomous systems and AI is not the plausible inevitability of monumental vocational disruption; it is that there are so few ongoing or persistent, well-informed and broadly-accessible public and (non-partisan) political discussions regarding the extent to which these upheavals will reshape entire economic, social and cultural value…
