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 […]
Tag: society
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The Freedom Game
Freedom of Self is a game we play in which we trade an Other’s control for our own. In all the sparkle and fireworks of our relentless jubilation we fail to recognise that we still play by the same rules and are in essence no more free than we were before. Additionaly: we free to […]
The strangest thing about all of our systems of governance, control and social maintenance is that it is in the very act(s) of attempting to create order that we must necessarily also generate disorder. The more components, moving parts and abstract logical relationships we introduce into the world, the more degrees of autonomous systemic and […]
A central problem of all political systems is that the idealised abstractions of those systems are of a fundamentally different kind or class of entity than are the lived experiences and material extension or implementation of those systems into, upon, through and as the world. There is a fundamental (and foundational) discontinuity between the material […]
The cost of order is always going to be a certain degree, presence or manifestation of disorder. The notion of a “more peaceful world” is one in which vast numbers of (relatively) small, regional conflicts proliferate, generalisations notwithstanding. There is even, perhaps, a sense in which such distributed conflict is inevitable as a displaced information […]
All ordered organisational systems are engaged in an endless competition with (and of) disorder and entropy; it is a race to weave order and patterned persistence from available resources while the other end of the tapestry continuously unravels into largely unrecoverable waste and loss. These organisational systems aspire to a relatively stable or constructively adaptive […]
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Mind the Gap
Our systems of logistics and commuter transport derive the abstract, symbolic value and benefit of logical continuity from their function just as much as the commuters do.
Complexity is a lot smarter than we are – all of our ratiobal interdictions into behavioural and sociological problems tend to amplify by displacement those problems.
Does social media only really exploit us and invoke reflexive psychological and emotional dependency?
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Uniform Individuality
Aspirations to difference and self-individuation through fashion, personal taste or behaviour are really just an evolution of tribal identity and group membership. Belonging to a group that does not belong to a group by virtue of adaptively-defined expressions and experiences of individuality is still to belong to a group.
The distributed information systems which we experience as social, cultural, economic and cognitive (or technologically-mediated) reality are implicitly weighted towards the self-replication and reproduction of existing patterns and biases.
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The Emptiness
There may be something tragically inevitable in the procedural hollowing-out of social lives in an era of accelerating and technologically-mediated hyper-connectivity.
Daedelus Kite 