The dynamism and flexibility of language is simultaneously its strength and its weakness. This is a corollary of the abstract/logical and concrete/material extensibility that haunts technology as cyber (in)security but is by no means limited there. It is an irreducibly discontinuous symmetry of uncertainty that plagues all organisations and institutional contexts. The incessant invention of […]
As with any other cyclic return – including conflict, revolution and large-scale systemic collapse – a holistic and complex systems analysis suggests a few salient points. Feudal systems of warring tribes return again and again (wearing different uniforms and wielding new vocabularies or other socioeconomic and technological accessories) because they are the optimally-concise self-organisational method […]
All politics is an antithesis to human potential and – beyond a limited facility to produce useful organisational patterns towards sustainable organisational continuity – where it is applied to matters of spirituality or any other metaphysical entity or system of belief, it is merely a demonstration of our ability to (and fascination with) our aptitude […]
As a general observation: notice the many ways that psychological and ideological belief systems adopted and asserted by any particular person or tribe need have no particular anchor in reality. All belief systems possess this essentially tautological interior architecture of interdependent symbolic relationships which can so easily be entirely dissociated from demonstrable facts. This is […]
This (image above) is how I feel watching history unfold around me. Our Global systems of governance, organisation and power are in essence defined (but hardly well-designed) to compel and incentivise the ascendancy of those ideas and individuals who do not – counter-intuitively – actually represent the best-interests of that world as a whole or […]
Could art (and its attendant adaptive contours of information artefacts or entities that we recognise as religion) ever have become what it was if representational technologies such as Instagram, Facebook or Twitter existed at the time of Jesus’ life, or even the Renaissance? Is religion a function of unknowing and does faith necessarily require the […]
Context: Republican plan could embed destructive US foreign policy What a curious world this is where the aesthetic ambiguities of political self-interest are quite prepared to embrace such dissociative pathologies (and personalities) as would have shamed their forebears into abject silence. In some ways we might assert that this is symptomatic of a historical moment […]
The persistent value in literature such as Eric Blair‘s seems, to me, to be substantively – if counter-intuitively – abstracted from the political filter through which it may (or may not) be interpreted. While we seem collectively unable (or unwilling) – and much to my own chagrin – to just “get beyond” and “get over” […]
Politics is really nothing more than ethics writ large. Any sense in which political science, ideology or (the all-too-often psychologically dissociative dark arts of) ethical rhetoric are axiomatic or mechanistic systems is a misdirection to what they might actually be or become. We find ourselves, more than a Century after relativistic geometry demonstrated that not […]
It endlessly mystifies me that humanity, in finding itself so much more Globally-connected from an information or communications and technological perspective, simultaneously finds itself so catastrophically fragmented, isolated and divided from itself. It was never that we could not obtain the Universal freedom, direction or common goal that might potentially have united us so much […]
In what ways does regulation, interdiction, surveillance and retrospective analysis or definition actually and inadvertently (re)produce the problems it seeks to diminish? Distinctions between legal and illegal are clearly and self-evidently important but in terms of comprehensive analysis and aspirations towards effective problem resolution they may also be a foundational misdirection. It is becoming clear […]
Context: In 2020, let’s stop AI ethics-washing and actually do something The most mystifying aspect of this ethical issue is that, on a quick survey of available literature, the emphasis is clearly on “fixing the technology” but leaves as conspicuously absent any concerted attempt to “fix our societies” even though these are in fact the […]
