Context: Attack Mannequins: AI as Propaganda An interesting article but the assertion of ideological counter-propaganda in this context is a bit of stretch. It projects much more structure, aptitude and volition to the behavioural and regulatory (as control/governance) systems than has ever actually existed. The assertion of all ideological positions requires a foil, an antithesis […]
Context: The World of Tadeusz Borowski’s Auschwitz – The New York Review There is “a certain orientation of life toward death” that forms the basis and existential kernel of a pathology that transcribes the arc and trajectory of (an) industrialised or mechanised rationality that in being (or becoming) aspirationally unbounded from the consequences of its […]
Belief is a system of fictional narrative that by sufficient self-replication begins to masquerade as truth. In systems of language and communication, all definitions are made in terms of other definitions that inevitably loop back to enfold the entire system in a singularly intricate autocatalytic loop of self-referential tautology. Systems of belief are similarly self-inflected […]
If it is true that there does in fact exist a class (or singular, if enigmatic, presence) of global systems theories that successfully, comprehensively and usefully abstract universal properties, theorems or logical relationships in any one non-trivially complex or sophisticated system and integrated, adaptive and evolutionary context; then those insights, abstractions and global properties solve […]
It need hardly be said that good ideas quite simply sell themselves without any effort whatsoever. Were it not that bad ideas possess just as much potential viral transmissibility as the good ones, we might not all be in quite the Global geopolitical pickle we currently find ourselves in. Truly terrible ideas, though, being hardly […]
Political systems, as much as the ideologies which endlessly resonate through them, are very much not as controlled or indicative of individual or collective self-determination as people might choose to believe. There is certainly choice, just as there is responsibility, but the overall complex dynamical system as information and energy-processing field that these artefacts embody […]
Sunday morning brought this little documentary gem of existential anxiety to my digital doorstep: The future of modern warfare: How technology is transforming conflict. Long gone are the days when a newspaper delivery, thrown from a footpath and having missed its mark might shatter our living room window, allowing us the superficially satisfying retort of […]
It’s true that evolution proceeds iteratively and adds layer upon layer of complex utility to bodies, brains and to the disembodied behavioural systems recorded in and as culture or language and technology. Notice, however, that there is a certain threshold of confirmation and communication complexity at which entire nations, civilisations find themselves reverting to baser […]
The twilight of my own aspirations to a peaceful and purposefully useful life on Earth appears to be the dawn of a new Global stupidity. It would be somewhat less distressing to witness a general dissolution and devolution into the flailing, lumbering madness of political and ideological conflict were it not that the buffoons who […]
Note: this was originally written as a response to a specific contemporary geostrategic context for an audience that was spectacularly uninterested in my opinion, so I share it here just to keep it in some modest sense “alive” as a bundle of ideas. I can’t help but wonder if the threat of war is itself […]
Institutional entrepreneurship is endlessly problematised, perhaps, by the normative assumption of unquestionable axioms. What I mean by this is to suggest that, while the Ship of Theseus that most institutional contexts represent in endless procedural renewal, recursive replication and variations on a theme of what has come before is the nature of (all) our cultural […]
Anger almost always reveals an unconscious truth and as a general principle is an agnostic omnipresence across interpersonal and complex (intra- or inter-system) psychological and social dynamics. Extrapolating on this: the generation or cultivation of frictive behaviours or narratives forms the basis and constitutive self-validation of a largely and autonomously self-propagating neurosis. The pathology is […]
