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, […]
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) […]
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 […]
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 […]
There is quite a lot to be said for the psychological dynamics of a partisan pathology (on all sides of any conflict or adversarial competition) that can only ever define itself reflexively in opposition to and by difference from a fictionalised, idealised and almost entirely abstract fantasy of Other. It is an infantile symmetry that […]
Partisan Political Systems have a double life as what is visible and what is not. What is not obvious is generally the most interesting (and causally critical) feature. If a complex information and/or energy-processing (i.e. computational) system maintains sustainable intrinsic homeostatic and extrinsic contextual continuity through the reflexive priming of its environment as a pliable […]
A key problem: information and communication systems autonomously self-replicate by optimally-concise pattern encoding methods as an extended consequence of the orientation towards low-energy states. No surprise there, perhaps, for anyone versed in complexity theory but the problem is not necessarily the intractable antitheses by binary poles in this endless partisan argument so much as the […]
Context: The CCP’s Official Journal Falls in Line with Xi Jinping’s Cult of Personality As a more general philosophical observation agnostic of specific contexts (including -isms or persons), human beings are subject to reflexive psychological imprinting of a sort that leads us to cultivate these fantasies and fictions of triumphant great leaders as an inadvertent […]
I am endlessly fascinated by the many ways that these systems of knowledge and information or culture and political momentum tend towards similar, recurring self-organisational and behavioural patterns. Much is (rightly) made of a contemporary, pronounced turn towards populism and authoritarianism. A suggestion for interpretation which does not seek to directly engage any specific instance […]
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 […]
Daedelus Kite 