This world of inflated, tangled emptiness is the world we have together made and together we will watch as it actively disassembles itself. The mysterious and unknowable vacuum beyond knowledge is essentially the same logical entity as is the foundational void within it. Epistemological certainty and self-identity or self-knowledge are limited by the same essential […]
A central problem of all political systems is that the idealised abstractions of those systems are of a fundamentally different kind or class of entity than are the lived experiences and material extension or implementation of those systems into, upon, through and as the world. There is a fundamental (and foundational) discontinuity between the material […]
It is fascinating to consider that an anachronistic hierarchy produces precisely the organisational inertia and systemic entropy that it itself is best oriented to negotiate (and through this to endlessly reproduce its own self-validating necessity). It is quite likely that the path of least effort and autonomously self-organising (i.e. low energy-state, minimal algorithmic complexity) systems […]
The nature of leadership, at least beyond any simplistic caricature, is surely as an emergent pivot and catalyst for change. All members of an organisation are actors in this – the distributed leadership quotient – and the emergence of critical, decision-making nodes such as those we identify as “leaders” is perhaps merely an autonomous and […]
There exists a radical misunderstanding and of the nature and of the role information plays in our lives and world. We do not possess or own information in any substantive sense – at least not beyond a certain superficial psychological or cultural attachment that really only serves to mask the many ways that information, in […]
There is a well-known meme which features a photograph of a notoriously unintelligent celebrity – take your pick, there are certainly plenty to choose from – with the accompanying text: “stop making stupid people famous.” The thing is – stupid people might actually be the perfect candidates for celebrity. These lucky (or – if we […]
Observe how the image in the mirror of all of our aspirational self-definitions is the machine, logic, the structured and ordered grammar of a game, a recurring pattern and design or, most overtly in our globally interdependent information and communications networks: an algorithmic sequence. The fantasy of truth, of certainty (beyond that which can be […]
“Reality” is a subtle concept. An artist creates an artefact, a fact, a reality through the skillful convergence of other facts. Those other references and earlier, representational facts were similarly composed of other, earlier facts. This is how our minds (and cultures) endlessly rebuild this world. In this way – we often mistake the discrete, […]
The cost of order is always going to be a certain degree, presence or manifestation of disorder. The notion of a “more peaceful world” is one in which vast numbers of (relatively) small, regional conflicts proliferate, generalisations notwithstanding. There is even, perhaps, a sense in which such distributed conflict is inevitable as a displaced information […]
It is often simpler to love the unknown and the unknowable; a perfect enigma and unsolved mystery represents the endless seduction of a treasure that hovers playfully, eternally just out of reach and in pursuit of which we might build a whole personality, culture and civilisation. How often do we choose a distant fantasy over […]
Some reflections occurred to me while listening to this Santa Fe Institute podcast today: Rajiv Sethi on Stereotypes, Crime, and The Pursuit of Justice, What of questions concerning the nature of social, psychological and cultural value systems when considered as a unified whole? While it is clear that the aggregate macrostate of any particular system […]
The essential art in the formation of self-identity is the cultivation of an ideal object around which to sediment and concretise that self. Lacan identified a “Mirror Stage” in psychological development which concisely captures the cognitive and cultural arc of our shared experience. The catch (and cost) here: to maintain persistence, continuity and individuation, the […]
Daedelus Kite 