There is, perhaps, as much to be said for an acquired art and experience of “self-surveillance” as there is of the orchestrated ubiquity of surveillance in information and (communications) technology that Orwell predicted. The longer arc and trajectory of human history has been one in which the inflating internal, interior spaces of memory and perception […]
Narrative is a curious beast and whether or not we assert it as resident or absent in minds, lives, cultures and selves – notice that we only ever invoke and generate more words when we debate a point upon it. I think we do just as well to consider that in as much as human […]
This morning I read an interesting online aphorism from a wise school that suggested that most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment. Much the same might be said, in functional microcosm, of the perceived value of a social media post or comment. We could ask how […]
Have you ever found yourself quite eloquently incapable of cutting through the purely intractable boundaries which condense between concept and utterance? The efferevescing liminalities between the images in your mind and the words with which you speak (and write) them sediment themselves between the structured experience of lived memory and the barren skeletons of orchestrated […]
Ever noticed that the more connected we all are, the more isolated we become? The more we are compelled to anchor our identities, experience and memory upon an external world, the lonelier and less certain this inner self becomes? Having once passed over the event horizon of self-accelerating sociotechnical metamorphosis we are each and all […]
Our all too human instinct and reflex is for the construction of system boundaries, gradients of definition, of adaptive frameworks of differentiation and models as metrics of distance and duration. In what ways is the drawing of lines, grids, matrices, referential networks and complex symmetries upon the shifting sands of experience as memory actually always […]
All our ontological aspirations to reflexively self-validating linguistic closure are forever shrouded in the mist of uncertainty that language itself invokes. Having found a resting place as existential security blanket and nominal narrative of purpose and reality, you will likely move on again, after a time, to another semantic center of gravity – it is […]
I was recently asked to write a short reflection on the Cybernetics of Time. It occurs to me that such a narrative must be in no small measure the Cybernetics of Causality. This itself leads to the curious revelation and plausibly cathartic insight that the aspirational control as shaping, influence or purposive feedback that inflates […]
Context: Google Engineer On Leave After He Claims AI Program Has Gone Sentient I do wonder if the preponderance towards inflected self-validation and effectively narcissistic pareidolia indicates, quite paradoxically, that subjectivity and prospective machine sentience are concepts essentially built upon smoke and mirrors. In seeking self as Other in the reflective mirror of technological determinism, […]
Watching the ramshackle parade and rickety cart of human civilisation bumping and bumbling along the deep corrugations of this muddy dirt track (of history) that it has never quite managed to effectively transcend, I am struck much less by the cyclical percolation of idiots and tyrants to positions of power than I am that we […]
I’ve said it before and I will say it again: freedom is not of self, it is from self. The boundaries and borders by and through which we define and cultivate our selves are also and quite counter-intuitively the shackles and chains that bind us. It is something of a paradox – the more we […]
Language is a struggle against the very dissolution and metamorphosis that language itself depends upon for growth and change. The extent to which it is paradoxically unfit for purposes of communication and comprehension is a measure of its success in a primary objective of iterative self-replication through the transmission medium that we ourselves represent. For […]
Daedelus Kite 