When the brute force of simple narratives overwhelms complexity, you see analysis and ethics crushed by scale. That is the moment you start to doubt purpose on this fragile, beautiful planet. Political chaos feels pre-scripted; people pivot their morals with alarming speed when pressure rises, and it’s hard to believe it was ever different. Riding […]
The atmosphere of American politics now resembles a dense fog of ideological noise. What registers as outrage, conviction or disgust is less the product of reasoned belief than the mechanics of replication: the simplest, most virulent signals race ahead of nuance. Words once tethered to meaning drift as tokens in a saturated field, their resonance […]
History has tended to imagine meaning as a property intrinsic to utterance, as though the resonance of Homer’s epic, a political slogan, or a fragment of scripture was carried forward by some eternal flame of truth. Yet the record suggests otherwise: what endures is what circulates, and circulation itself confers the aura of importance. The […]
It is as fascinating as it is tragic. We may do well to question the eternal recurrence of unhinged banality and myopic jingoism as there are causal mechanisms in play. It is only incidentally about personalities: probability, entropy and adaptive statistical factors occupy the center of gravity. What percolates to ascendance tends to be those […]
It is a mistake to imagine that cruelty or deception arise from the rare brilliance of tyrants or the careful engineering of conspirators. The truth is flatter, colder: given time, scale, and opportunity, suffering emerges almost as a default outcome, an entropic drift in human systems. Power does not require genius to become exploitative; it […]
Finding ourselves existentially foregrounded as the protagonist in and of all we do, it is almost inevitable that we come to think of ourselves as exceptional or special and in those instances when the healthy doubt of a wise, common or garden-variety insecure intellect dawns upon us, we quite rapidly and gratefully barter our own […]
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.
The intinctual principle and hormonal drive which propels us toward coupling and copulation is simultaneously the psychological symmetry which compels us to seek unity and wholeness where there is, in fact, none. The last thing that any of us is likely to feel particularly comfortable in acknowledging is that we are all at base the […]
Do we make our own luck or does luck and the blind power of statistical necessity make us?
Will the enthusiastic cultural and economic act of handing our collective destinies over to an overt and arbitrary algorithmic logic lead to a gradual (or rapid) and self-propagating bias towards “flattening out” of outliers, eccentrics, and authentic innovation ?
Daedelus Kite 