Technology keeps solving the problems technology creates, tightening our dependence on machinery whose cumulative costs keep growing and from which there is no longer any clean exit.
Technology keeps solving the problems technology creates, tightening our dependence on machinery whose cumulative costs keep growing and from which there is no longer any clean exit.
The cam-streaming economy is not a peripheral adult subculture. It is a mature cybernetic marketplace where intimacy, affirmation, and erotic presence are priced, tokenised, and algorithmically regulated. Such platforms function as marketplaces for behaviours—attention, reciprocation, fantasy—rather than static objects. Thousands of performers broadcast continuously, producing a gradient of interaction from casual chat to explicit performance, […]
James Lovelock (1919–2022) was as pioneering as he was resisted. Uniquely famous for proposing the Gaia hypothesis—the idea that Earth behaves as a self-regulating system—he faced deep scepticism, dismissed by many as mystical or unscientific. Yet it was Daisyworld, his elegant simulation of a planet populated by simple black and white daisies, that provided a […]
Generative art: simulation or self-simulation?
An effervescing philosophical idiom of simulation hypotheses is really just Cartesian doubt wearing steampunk cosplay. Even then and in so very many ways the associated concepts of rationality stretch back to an Aristotelian logical turn that passes through many minds and places before a Boolean backflip into computational brevity as manifest cybernetic control and all […]
Context: Largest virtual universe free for anyone to explore The TL;DR: Scientists have created an absolute computational monster of a Universe digital twin simulation. Such sophisticated models, simulations and predictive tools are measured by the material and organisational costs as displacement of complexity into integrated hardware, processing and memory as much as by the representational […]
Context: What Is Synthetic Data? …and yet, with this – the bootstrap into virtualised abstraction becomes all but complete. Fascinating and clearly intersects with some of Jean Baudrillard’s observations on simulation, semiotics and reality. Training machine intelligence on data generated in virtual worlds solves some tricky problems but at what cost; where does the “real-world” […]
Context: Annual index finds AI is ‘industrializing’ but needs better metrics and testing If an intractable problem in any such rapidly-evolving technological or regulatory frame of reference is that an accelerating pace of change at least partially invalidates models, axioms and assumptions before they have ever even been operationalised, then we find ourselves (yet again) staring […]
Context: Could We Force the Universe to Crash? If we were to take seriously the implications of much-maligned and misunderstood general principles of endemic incompleteness and uncertainty that occur both in and as distributed (“Global”) hyper-surfaces across logic, physics and mathematics, we might consider that such a cosmological “Entscheidungsproblem” is not so much fantasy as […]
Context: HyperNormalisation… “HyperNormalisation is a yearning for simplicity, certainty and knowing — a fake simple world — in a world of complexity and uncertainty — a complex real world.” – Richard Schutte There are resonances here with Jean Baudrillard’s conceptually-labyrinthine Simulacra and Simulation; a conversation regarding that dissimulation which never conceals the truth, but is rather – “the […]
Simulating the Universe to approximate to an understanding of galactic evolution.
Bureaucracy Simulator 2.0, in stores near you soon…