Reductive abstractions in explanatory systems serve very well to ground those systems in self-validating (if demonstrably incomplete) logic, and possess considerable power and compelling reasons to believe them. Observe the thread of Turing‘s abstraction arrive in the (perhaps inevitable) artefacts, entities and exceptional utility of cloud computing – the simulated computing machines of various kinds: […]
Tag: social media
The extent to which we are all merely self-propagating soliton-like saliences in a rippling probabilistic field of information and energy remains largely unexplored but fertile for investigation.
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We’re on the Road to Nowhere
The kind of puzzle indicated here are commonly associated with a genre of social media clickbait that often leads down a steep rabbit-hole of commercial datapoint acquisition. Cambridge Analytica’s artful gullbility-harvesting tests were a case in point and emphasise a significant correlation between (personal) online identity-construction and the production of an implicit informational value around […]
How strange it is that we should all spend our lives in pursuit of some idealised goal of perfect self-abstraction, of well-defined subjectivity and psychological closure when everything we learn on this journey of life informs us that this is in fact impossible. We learn by entrainment and enculturation that we should abhor and shum […]
Some philosophical thoughts on these contemporary, massively-distributed online communications systems: • social media now (largely) subsumes news media and the powerful, potentially unmanageable, flow and form of recursively self-propagating information-processing systems is such that even putatively reputable media or news channels – not to mention governments – are forced to contort themselves and their narratives […]
All of this online communication really feels a bit like trying to talk (or shout) underwater; no one can hear us and no one is really listening or paying attention anyway. The greatest misdirection and deception of this is that while we are (all) here pouring our hearts and minds out into this digital information […]
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Rethinking Social Media
I came across an interesting idea today: the production of a new, reliable, verifiable, safe and trustworthy social media platform. My reflex was to think: what of the tendency of information and energy-processing (i.e. communications) systems to autonomously drift into optimally-concise patterns and methods of self-propagation? There is no particular brilliance about Facebook et. al. […]
I am for my own reasons holding out against complete personal digital metamorphosis and still receive a large percentage of my news media through television, regardless that the electromagnetic signal itself is digitally-encoded. An advantage that I derive from television news is that, unlike the overtly digital communications channels of social media and YouTube, the […]
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Decoding Instagram
The ancient emergence of information-encoding mechanisms that seek both optimal self-replication and resilience against catastrophic loss of components and sub-systems – in contemporary manifestation.
Does social media only really exploit us and invoke reflexive psychological and emotional dependency?
Facebook has a genocide problem.
Corporate power in the technology domain is a complex cartography but it is not indecipherable. It takes intelligence and subtlety to address the problem of autonomously self-propagating information systems that have grown too large, too fast and in all of this speed and runaway self-replication represent something of an atavistic return to a state of accelerated reproduction which in cells occurs in (or as) cancer.
