The conceptual abstraction of a central anchor or point of cognitive, cultural or communications system leverage is a fiction. Language and the underlying existential facts of individuated biological persistence furnish us with misleading intuitions regarding identity and all associated truths. A conceptual center is the abstraction upon and through which we reflexively self-validate various teleologies […]
We call it “civilisation” as though it were truly and in any measurably definable sense a civil or even gentle presence when all we really mean by this word is that amorphous mass and unknowing ocean of shambling humanity or maddening crowd we find ourselves at any particular time and place quite inadvertently inhabiting. It […]
Global problems require Global solutions but a unified approach to shared problems is nothing if not conspicuous by its absence. Key issues here are that ineffective solutions supporting and cultivating piecemeal or reductive and iterative engagement with such complex, distributed problems are the primary artefacts and policy idioms that tend to percolate to ascendancy through […]
How to alienate and enrage 99% of the world? Tell them that almost all of their contemporary cultural practices, beliefs, interests, hobbies and pastimes are shallow, superficial assertions of tribal identity that do little more than provide temporary comfort in an ultimately hostile, selfish and uncaring world. It is not that these cultural practices and […]
The most mystifying truth of all is that we live in a world that defines value and success in such limited terms, as being little more than successfully replicating the patterns and conventions of behaviour and thought that we encounter and through which we learn to play a game of simple (or – often enough […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Daedelus Kite 