The dream is over. Technology, technology companies, and integrated sociopolitical communication systems are not coming to save us. They were never neutral, and they failed at the first serious encounter with technically mediated political extremism. Not accidentally. Voluntarily. They did not merely look away. They amplified, rewarded, and normalised it, all while their balance sheets […]
Technology is no longer a peripheral factor in abuse and social harm. It has become part of the mechanism. Research on technology-facilitated coercive control shows how perpetrators use everyday digital tools — smartphones, cloud accounts, GPS services, social media, spyware, smart home systems — to extend surveillance, isolation and intimidation beyond physical proximity, making abuse […]
Language, with unbounded combinatorial multiplicity and potentially endless degrees of conceptual freedom, remains insufficient to provide the closure or certainty we often seek when navigating the complex worlds and systems of belief we have constructed. Yet it is precisely this absence of closure that makes language meaningful. Meaning is grounded in ambiguity, an irreducible tension […]
The arc and trajectory of (a) psychosis resonates. An obsessive assertion of and fixation upon deterministic identities and roles both depends upon and further exacerbates the insecurities that drive this whole system. Control, once asserted, almost always and agnostic of context invokes a signal and downstream cascade of entropic consequences that are then further refined, […]
Context: New Biosensors Allow Earbuds To Record Brain Activity and Exercise Levels This is all moving inexorably towards and through a world in which omnipresent interfaces to human bodies (and brains) so seamlessly merge surveillance and digital entertainment as information encoding, decoding and transmission, that not only does the functional dichotomy of “for me” and […]
All media is social media. (It’s long past time to tear that bandaid off.) The degree to which the media consumers can engage with and influence that media has certainly undergone some dramatic revisions in recent years but at heart this all remains a social communications system. It is also worth acknowledging that, while the […]
There is, perhaps, as much to be said for an acquired art and experience of “self-surveillance” as there is of the orchestrated ubiquity of surveillance in information and (communications) technology that Orwell predicted. The longer arc and trajectory of human history has been one in which the inflating internal, interior spaces of memory and perception […]
Entangled narratives, aren’t we all? A related reflection is as to why the autocatalytic theatre of dystopian pathology percolates to ascendance quite as often as it does…
Context: AI Will Hack Our Brains, Expert Says Can we shape the use, value and utility of Big Data and AI in ways which benefit humanity? I am not entirely pessimistic but pragmatic realism invokes both caution and trepidation here. Ethics. A definition of “good use of data” is subject to considerable ethical uncertainty and […]
Context: How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation There’s the rub. Not only do complex information and communication networks optimally self-propagate through the autonomous cultivation of threshold levels of dissonance, error and what amounts here to a nurtured “fidelity drift”, commercial and existential (corporate) incentives in this context are quite natively oriented towards it. The […]
Context: Pentagon Wants AI to Predict Events Before They Occur If we abstract the concept of pattern formation from its instances, this becomes plausible. This becomes about not specifically determining what is going to happen but rather and as a function of the resonant (i.e. harmonic) symmetries endemic of and to complex systems, where and […]
Context: Brave new Netherlands: This Dutch AI start-up is changing healthcare Michel Foucault‘s observations on the role and nature of surveillance and knowledge were quite on point in regards to this. The nature of a disciplinary/regulatory and /or cybernetic system of social control is such that what occurs in health quickly permeates and percolates through […]
Daedelus Kite 