Every day, in the afternoon or early evening, for around 4 weeks a blanket of smoke has drifted across my city. I reflected on this here recently but tonight I found myself inadvertently caught up in the smoke as I was walking. My eyes are stinging, I have a sickening burnt wood taste in the […]
Tag: politics
What is perhaps most disturbing about the artival of autonomous systems and AI is not the plausible inevitability of monumental vocational disruption; it is that there are so few ongoing or persistent, well-informed and broadly-accessible public and (non-partisan) political discussions regarding the extent to which these upheavals will reshape entire economic, social and cultural value […]
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Climate Inaction: Let the Bumbling Begin
Never mind that the sum-total of all available evidence is so profound that the only plausible chance anyone has of not believing that Climate Change is upon us is to either be so naive or so maliciously ignorant that it is impossible to admit this fact into their personal conceptual vocabulary and interpretive framework of […]
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The Shadows of Entropy
It is a truth almost universally known but rarely, if ever, acknowledged that the strengths and the values of our world are simultaneously its weakness and qualitative (as much as quantitative) poverty. Contemporary communications systems have, for instance, been truly wonderous – they have brought us all closer together through near-instaneous text, voice and video […]
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Geopolitical Exasperation
Exasperation is a condition of annoyance, irritation and frustration. It is a word that is perhaps best used where feelings of futility or powerlessness are also significant contextual factors. My own persistent experience of exasperation has been in professional and intellectual contexts. The central focus of my angst and frustration is that of being unable […]
A fascinating feature of contemporary organisational systems, and at all scales of magnitude, is the various ways in which they subscribe to a simplistic mechanical and linear model of ontology and operation. It is as though, while everyone and everywhere is more than happy to commercially and politically exploit the Post-Newtonian and Post-Industrial Revolution technologies […]
Why is it that ideological, political and organisational ineptitude and incompetence are endlessly reoccurring phenomena? If the longer-term evolutionary or biological history of a living system, including it’s diverse manifestations in and as cultural and political systems, is oriented towards efficient self-replication and continuity, why is it that so many poor-fitting (and indeed – positively […]
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UN Climate Action Summit
I was watching a live broadcast of a speech from the UN Climate Action Summit this morning. It was a great speech – very well written, articulate, intelligent, well-timed and well-delivered. For the particular political personality involved, this is undoubtedly a tour de force and, perhaps, a career-pinnacle of statesmanship and Global leadership. There is, […]
Don’t be fooled into a false sense of security by the fact that a worst-case climate apocalypse is intimately terrifying on a scale exceeding any story that humanity ever told itself and is so far beyond our limited experience that we more readily characterise it as myth or fiction. At the scale of disaster we […]
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Climate Strike: Which Economy?
I observed a characteristically parochial performance from a politician on the morning news today. The topic of the Global Climate Strike was under analysis and the tired old excuses for workers and schoolchildren not attending the rallies and protests were wobbled around with rhetorical ineptitude. An argument was made for the importance of a strong […]
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Ideological Trickery
The primary cultural purpose of the production of ideological and political difference is the continuing production (and reproduction) of ideological and political difference. The logical abstractions of information and entropy self-replication autonomously seek optimal methods of self-replication and self-propagation – through the individuated or tribal cognitive entities and artefacts of culture and communications systems. Observe […]
As you get older it seems that your options diminish, quite literally and as entropy takes hold the vast numbers of disordered states that you might end up in become less improbable, more certain. It is not so much a matter of age as it is of experience and an aggregate burden of negotiating the […]
Daedelus Kite 