Categories
cybernetics

Social (in)Security: Criminalising Poverty

Societies consistently construct narratives that assign blame to those who occupy marginal positions, even as they depend structurally on their existence. Numerous sociological studies confirm that poverty and unemployment are not simply outcomes of individual failings but consequences of systemic factors. William Julius Wilson in When Work Disappears (1996) demonstrates how the erosion of stable […]

Categories
culture

Hollow, Haunted, Unwanted: callous social systems

It’s interesting that when you get sick and fall through the gaps in regards to unemployment, social engagement, there’s no support. You’re basically thrown out as far as possible, as quick as possible, and it is made as hard as possible to come back. That is the basis upon which social value is built, upon […]

Categories
Complexity cybernetics environment freedom humanity imagination mathematics Philosophy Psychology

Unity

If unity is assumed, then the only coherent approach is to work backwards from it. This is not about sentiment or abstraction but about logical necessity: if there is unity, then every relation already participates in it, and our task is to discern how those connections reproduce the whole. Unity is not an optional conclusion […]

Categories
Philosophy

On Suffering

Suffering is not a mistake in the order of things; it is the order. What feels like rupture, misalignment, or lack of closure is the very condition that generates motion and awareness. Without tension, the field would dissolve into stasis. The loop persists because it cannot do otherwise, and every attempt to escape its curvature […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Money

Money is not the solution. It is the source of most of our problems. The worst thing about this strangely powerful abstraction of value and possession is that it seems as though inequitable outcomes are not only probable, they are positively mandatory in this complex system of systems that our world represents. For anything to […]

Categories
Philosophy

Wealthy Parents

Would you have preferred to have had rich parents? It should matter to you that wealth is not conjured miraculously from nothing and that the cost might not always be obvious but it is always there. Poverty only exists because wealth does.

Categories
Philosophy Psychology

Homeless Fears

There are many kinds of fear. Some of them are straightforward, unproblematic and represent a simple correlation between a concept and the thing it represents. In this sense a fear of a specific animal is usually just that and regardless that arachnophobia, for instance, rarely represents something unconscious or indirect other than a linearly-related fear […]

Categories
Philosophy

Stimulus Shenanigans and Structural Inequality

Stress-testing a socioeconomic system: enduring and intractable problems of structural inequality percolate to the surface at moments of extreme duress. The truth is, this system is not foundationally oriented towards supporting anyone other than those who least need it. The people who most need help when the crap hits the fan (as it most certainly […]

Categories
Philosophy

Art, Inauthenticity and Poverty

Art requires inauthenticity just like wealth requires poverty. The issue is that wealth and all associated power is of necessity a narrowly-focused exclusive, dissipative system that, like a tornado, maintains coherence and continuity through offsetting its own cost and entropy to an environment composed of poverty and disempowered, disenfranchised multitudes. Wealth foundationally depends upon the […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

The Aesthetics of Poverty

Aesthetics is not only about the appraisal and critical assessment of beauty in art or any other form. It is also an analysis of sensory experience, of perception. Perception is directly related to assessments of beauty, of symmetry and of value and inflates our experience with judgements – both known and unknown, recognised and unacknowledged. […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

American Decline

American capitalism is an evolving information and energy-processing (i.e. computational) system and complex socioeconomic metabolism that possesses implicit spatial, temporal and material limits. Where boundaries are eventually encountered, the reflexive impulse is for any such system so foundationally grounded upon assumptions of the heroic values implicit to (a) consumptive necessity to begin, slowly – at […]

Categories
culture

Things fall apart…

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 […]