We inhabit distributed sociopolitical information systems that play out logical symmetries (i.e. of mathematics, physics) through the transmission medium of aggregate human agency as behavioural (essentially cognitive) micro-systems of and as decision-making machines. Does the transmission medium (i.e. human agency, volition, free will) drive the system or does the system almost entirely and autonomously self-propagate […]
Tag: politics
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Problems of Constitutional Democracy
Watching the information bonfire of the current US election processes is troubling, to say the least. Beyond external interference in the fidelity of democracy and the internal dissonance of a nation being in many ways torn apart by incessant adversarial posturing and partisan self-interest, there is in this situation an instance of some broader unresolved […]
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Disinformation Questions
Some general philosophical questions and reflections on disinformation: To what extent is disinformation not only evidence of directed or (even, in a limited sense) desirable artefacts, belief systems or entities, and to what extent is disinformation itself an irreducible property of large-scale sociotechnical systems? Our languages and institutional, geopolitical and self-organisational logics require we leverage […]
Context: Oakland, Portland sue over use of federal agents at protests A generally irreducible property of pathological ideologies, context and partisan-agnostic – in as much as any assertion can ever now be, is that they work industriously (and just as often unconsciously) towards the recreation of the circumstances that validate their insecurity and the actions […]
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How Disinformation Works
The old Nietzschean idiom about the abyss staring back seems apt here – as we gaze into an abyss of political chaos, partisan insecurity, confusion and intractable information complexity. This is precisely what is being done in the US right now through externally (and internally) sourced disinformation. Notice that, agnostic of truth-value, distributed patterns of […]
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Fighting for Peace?
I am really quite endlessly fascinated by the many ways that these political, cultural and spiritual traditions (both near and far in time and space, it must be said) become so readily or easily detached from their original motives and inspirations to become quite the opposite of their intended or asserted goals and often become […]
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Global Conflict: Time to Grow Up
While it may be low-hanging fruit and all references to it may be quite akin to stating the bleeding obvious, there is a distinct lack of unity in the world: wars, political dissonance, conflict, sabre-rattling and a thousand different flavours of internecine anger or paranoid fear. What might be somewhat less obvious in such an […]
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Cultural Life is Unity through Difference
Cultural life is a beautiful thing. In many ways it represents the hidden bonding unity of a people or a place. Always be wary of anyone who attempts to crush or erase cultural difference – the living thread and flow of human history is because of any fear of difference or Otherness, it is what […]
Context: Facebook: Recommended Principles for Regulation or Legislation to Combat Influence Operations It is a fascinating issue. I suggest that the complexity of the problem far outstrips these assertions of interdiction and oversight. We have seen pretty much the same thing happen in cyber security. Where a property or quality, if not the actual content, […]
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Policy trumps biodiversity, again.
On discovering that the Government of my country is putting policy (and thus ideology) before environment and refusing to sign a leader’s pledge on biodiversity: Australia joins US, China and Russia in refusing to sign leaders’ pledge on biodiversity The sophistication required here is at a level of complexity that almost entirely invalidates existing (institutional) […]
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The Wisdom of Crowds
The “wisdom of crowds” is, beyond the statistical phenomenon of mischievously accurate prediction, rarely approximate to any kind of wisdom whatsoever. Swept away in swells of emotional passion, people rarely notice that in seeking belonging and a salve or treatment for the irreducible existential uncertainties or emotional insecurities of life, they actually, wilfully surrender their […]
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The Oscillating Horrors of History
Context: Jonathan P. Baird: Nazi Germany and the fall of law It is a curious property of the dissociative logic and intractable pathology of any extreme ideological position, not just to sweep along compliant and unwitting collaborators who see in the asserted “strength” of their hollow belief system a reflexive framework upon which to hang […]
Daedelus Kite 