Categories
technology

Metaverse Fashion

Context: What to wear in the Metaverse? Why should we even need bodies? The momentum (and compulsion) towards abstraction is and has always been towards the progressive refinement and umbilical detachment of a fully virtualised bundle-of-experiences as self. In as much as this self is still grounded in material information processes and thermodynamic-as-energy costs, what […]

Categories
Philosophy

Unconscious Worlds

“The real question is not whether machines think but whether humans do.” B.F. Skinner Whether humans think or not seems to be a null question as so many clearly do not, finding themselves quite happily swept away upon whichever tide of passionate belief or causal provenance as first takes them. What interests me more is […]

Categories
Philosophy

Unsustainable Fashion

Context: The Myth of Sustainable Fashion …and not, as it turns out, an isolated instance of an industry and integrated economic culture being so profoundly shaped by and oriented towards cultivating obsolescence and waste that it could hardly continue to exist in any kind of recognisable form without it. In one regard, this is a […]

Categories
Philosophy technology

Robotic Inflection: Ameca

Context: Ameca, “the future face of robotics,” is as freaky as you’d expect The image in the mirror of rationality is the machine. The suspension of disbelief in the essential non-personality of Ameca is a function of a psychological (as much as cultural or technological) compulsion to reveal, to unveil ourselves in the world and, […]

Categories
life

Trauma

I have seen what trauma does. It can take good people and bend them backwards against their will, leading into all manner of despair and hardship. I have seen the ways that people self-define through the things they know and the suffering that has shaped them. I have witnessed as their lonely lives lead them […]

Categories
Philosophy

Social Media and the Need to Feel Loved

You might think it’s about being loved for how you look. But what you truly need is to be loved for who you are—beneath the image, before the performance, outside the frame. Only one of these forms of love endures. And only you can sense which one matters. This isn’t something you understand by reading […]

Categories
Philosophy

On things we can never know…

Context: Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, The Inherent Limitation Of Mathematics The discontinuous boundary condition at the edge of (as much as being that around which we built) logic, physics and mathematics is a global property, distributed across and as the complex hypersurface of a self-propagating, soliton-like hybrid matter/energy/information system. It is as though a logical vacuum, […]

Categories
politics

Why Autocratic Regimes Depend on Fear and Insecurity

Situation: Political Leader A is threatening to invade Country B for asserted reasons of historical justice, retribution, pride or security. Explanation: Political Leader A is threatening to invade Country B in order to keep their own people in line. Creating a sense of fear and insecurity is a way to make people feel like they […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Appetite for Destruction: the Aesthetics of War

As a species, we seem positively bound to cyclical, constructive inflation and reinvention of the artefacts, entities and cultural systems that quite naturally sediment in and as shared memory around such catastrophic historical episodes. The essence of history has been this headlong rush into cataclysmic violence, followed as denouement by much gentler growth and cultural […]

Categories
culture Philosophy

Suspended Animation

Feeling trapped? It’s just what we humans do and by goodness do we do it well. Endlessly orienting ourselves towards the games of self and other that culture, language and our psychological worlds bring upon us, we find ourselves hooked and strung across so many reciprocal obligations and complex social or economic responsibilities that there […]

Categories
politics

Political Theory of Control

The essence of an authoritarian political theory of control is one of identifying, generating or a fabricating difference by and through which subjectivities and identities can be manipulated through the recursive shaping of a self-validating insecurity. This is also why empire building becomes dependent upon a fear that eventually consumes and destroys itself. It is […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

All War is Civil War

How do we resolve the central enigma of human existence? That problem is not that simple yet intractable fact of our own existence, mystifyingly beautiful and as ultimately puzzling as this may be. Nor is it that we invest such a vast amount of our limited individual and collective time blundering from one catastrophic, often […]