Categories
environment

Climate Change In Security: Insecurity

It may be a matter of social and psychological necessity that this kind of monumental existential threat – to which we have perhaps long been desensitised by repetition and the droning monotony of unnecessarily adversarial ideological and political competition – carry more impact, more information entropy and cultural gravity when they become a tangible, material, […]

Categories
Philosophy

Homelesness: a “Wicked Problem” of Complexity

Why does homelessness occur and why is it so difficult to find and apply lasting solutions? In a nutshell: Entropy. This is not a rhetorical affectation but as an authentic explanatory and causal explanation. Many socioeconomic problems are complex but within a relatively limited problem “dimensionality” – consider crowd control or public transport. They are […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

The Violence Paradox: is this Really a More Peaceful World?

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 […]

Categories
culture

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.

Categories
culture

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.

Categories
AI

Inhibiting Intelligence

Conventional platitudes and “safe” research agendas actively inhibit the free flow of ideas that discovery and authentic intellectual creativity or intelligence require.

Categories
politics

There is no perfect social system

Just as there may never be any isolated closure and teleological endpoint to logic, physics and mathematics – there can also never be any such thing as the “one true way” or ideological and social perfection. There are only successive approximations and iterative algorithmic refinements towards a better world, without end.

Categories
history systems technology

Accelerating Frames of History

The moving frame, having moved, drags itself ever onwards…

Categories
culture

An Invention of Imperfection ?

The shortest form of technological solution is generally that of negation. It is in the essential and axiomatic logic of both communication and technology more generally to seek advantage through reduction, negation, compression.

Categories
politics

Ideological Entropy

Where intellectual or ethical bankruptcy is the pivot upon which any untenable political assertion or associated narrative rests, an overinvestment in faulty reasoning becomes something of an inevitability.

Categories
culture Organisation politics

On Leadership

Organisational cultures are not born fully-formed (or in any sense static or complete), they are best cultivated and nurtured. For better or for worse, our leaders reflect the ground from which they grow…

Categories
culture

Rage 2.0: Leveling Up

We may, culturally and symbolically, be collectively imprisoned by an adherence to a narrative of conflict, difference and aggressive conquest…