At a relatively recent “reunion” event, I noticed that the primary social process with which people were engaged was the negotiation and confirmation of facts, measurements, names, identities and dates. They were all, in essence, reconstructing a network graph of personal histories as effective coordinate systems by and through which to render their shared experience […]
I went to a party last night and found myself at times quite naturally drawn to stand back and observe the larger context of social circumstance and behavioural flow of the event. Many conversations gravitated towards the remembrance and collaborative confirmation of details, of dates and number or measurements and assertions of fact or reality; […]
The technology through which we measure, celebrate and cultivate our selves is simultaneously the blind-spot in our vision of that Self; this is as much a symptom of the technology as it is endemic of the introspective cultural and psychological process of self-definition. A technology of language and communication (or, really, any other art) has […]
Context: Pandemic Makes Evident ‘Grotesque’ Gender Inequality In Household Work No surprise, then, that undergoing traumatic paroxysms of existential stress in this pandemic has caused all those unacknowledged (and yet – hardly unknown) faultlines and inequitable socioeconomic discontinuities to percolate into awareness; cultural artefacts like some neurotic’s once poorly-masked behavioural anachronisms, endlessly and problematically oscillating […]
These are the empty spaces and hollow places that we now find, not merely between each other but also within (and as) our own selves. It takes at times a catastrophic disassembly of that intimate experience of living and of each other for us to be able to finally perceive the truth within which we […]
Sociality and interdependence is our species’ strength but is simultaneously also our weakness. The complex networks and intangible feedback loops of behaviour, communication, material artefacts and technologies upon which we have built a Global civilisation, such as it is, are autonomously self-propagating information systems. Once such psychological, social and cultural systems have gained energy and […]
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. […]
Does social media only really exploit us and invoke reflexive psychological and emotional dependency?
The primary purpose of cultural systems, sub-systems and sub- or counter-cultures is also their primary method. That is (and fundamentally): the replication of the process of self-replication.
The various cultural contexts, parameters and metrics indicating that possibility for the existence of the sensible, the rational and the sane are also those shared borders of distance and difference defining the improbable, the implausible and the ridiculous…
Daedelus Kite 