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 […]
Perhaps “the centre cannot hold” because there is no centre. Chaos and disorder are far more the native state of material (thermodynamic, dissipative) facts than are the projected order and control around which we reflexively and aspirationally self-validate. Curious, indeed, (and under one perspective) that everything emerging out of the complexity sciences suggests that it […]
Context: Officials see extremist groups, disinformation in protests A Gordian Knot. How much of this disinformation is generated internally and how much externally to national borders? Have we all (i.e. Globally) arrived in a set of circumstances that suggest that, functionally – at least, the differentiation of source and attribution is not as (ultimately) significant […]
An interesting question is as to the inevitability of capitalism – or something very much like it – in any hyper-inflating socioeconomic (and by extension, geopolitical) referential space. That is to say: are there senses in which the natural bias towards autonomously self-optimising information and energy-processing systems – as manifest through and as human civilisation(s) […]
Context: Strong Yet Brittle: The Risks of Digital Authoritarianism There are quite probable logical and (by extension, mathematical and) distributed material or socioeconomic, not to mention strategic, senses in which a strict adherence to unwavering and inflexible closure and continuity must necessarily create the conditions of inevitable, eventual and/or accelerated structural disassembly or decline. A […]
Context: Trump threatens social media after Twitter puts warning on his false claims The dissonant entropy of salient adversarialism finds optimal self-replication through staccato bursts of semi-coherent linguistic superficiality and Twitter is a weapon of choice. If the primary medium of transmission could even plausibly be extinguished, an entire operating model and communications strategy (such […]
Context: Colouring Russian views of conflict in the 21st century Positing strategic culture, as are all cultures, as a semantic overlay or usefully-reductive functional self-representation (if even as that which exists unacknowledged or notionally unconscious) of any state is compelling and undoubtedly carries some gravity but such articulate eloquence often masks a fatal analytical flaw. […]
Context: HyperNormalisation… “HyperNormalisation is a yearning for simplicity, certainty and knowing — a fake simple world — in a world of complexity and uncertainty — a complex real world.” – Richard Schutte There are resonances here with Jean Baudrillard’s conceptually-labyrinthine Simulacra and Simulation; a conversation regarding that dissimulation which never conceals the truth, but is rather – “the […]
Daedelus Kite 