One thing that appears as something of a universal property of human behaviour is that we define ourselves much more by negative experiences than by or through positive ones; regardless of the extent to which we might prefer to maintain positive affirmations and self-perceptions – the darkness looms large in our imaginations. Most shared (national) […]
Tag: politics
Trump
Shared, directed and manipulated dissociative delusions of grandeur or competency follow quite naturally from a world in which endless tides of abbreviated technologically-mediated superficialities are in ascendancy. If it wasn’t him in this role, it would have quite probably (and eventually) been someone just like him. What is of far more interest than that a […]
Dead Heat: Climate
Context: Climate change: 2020 in a dead heat for world’s warmest year Climate change has been off the radar for a while, it seems and while the shit-show and train-wreck of 2020 rolls on into 2021, there are some things which seem painfully obvious to me but which also, for whatever reason, seem to be […]
Partial assertions of self-control are foundational in personality formation but where they find themselves amplified at scale into authoritarian pathologies we witness the birth of profoundly insecure, uncontrollable beasts upon and in which no truly happy life might ever be cultivated.
Stress-testing a socioeconomic system: enduring and intractable problems of structural inequality percolate to the surface at moments of extreme duress. The truth is, this system is not foundationally oriented towards supporting anyone other than those who least need it. The people who most need help when the crap hits the fan (as it most certainly […]
The thing about cyber and conflict…
Insecurity is implicit to – and irreducible in – technology. There is absolutely no way to guarantee complete and permanent closure of *any* communications system because the indefinitely-extensible logical and material basis of accelerating technological innovation is simultaneously the proliferation of increased probabilities of vulnerability and critical incidents. While there is something of a booming […]
Future of Humanity
Context: The Future of Life Institute The endemic and omnipresent enlightened self-interest of human psychology is generally such that, while we may already and for the most part possess the technical and cognitive or linguistic and technological tools necessary to architect our own freedom and a shared, peaceful and sustainable future – we are so […]
Planet Politics
The sheer unrepentant complexity and high-dimensionality of the Global problem spaces we face as a technological civilisation imply that to ever or even just survive, the proliferation of shallow and meaningless ideological caricatures may be a necessary component into the far future of humanity. Communication mandates a certain degree of simplicity but reality itself is […]
The questions being asked and the problems being solved across government, industry and the community are almost entirely superficial and beyond the general effervescence of hype and rapidly-fading excitement or media and popular interest, the institutional processes and behavioural practices we inhabit have become self-validating rationales. We do not possess any such thing as a […]
To what extent does the concept or operational implementation of boundaries and nation states quite necessarily both depend on and inadvertently amplify the ongoing and relentless human displacements we currently observe? We might say that the existence and sustainable continuity of boundaries and associated patchwork quilt of international relations (quite beyond the intermittent discontinuities of […]
Constructive Disinformation
Why is language so generally, genuinely and in all but the most trivial, superficial of meaningless of instances quite catastrophically inadequate for the task of clear and unproblematic communication? What is it, that is, that shrouds our primary method and medium of personal (interior, cognitive) or interpersonal communication in ambiguity and doubt? Beyond the irreducible […]
Irrational History
We are all quite conditioned to think in terms of history as a process that contains some irreducible rational thread; that while the events, entities and artefacts that constitute history might themselves be chaotic or even (and in many cases) entirely meaningless, that there is a logical truth of history no less than there is […]