As it ever has been with this human being: finding an order, a pattern a convention or conceptual trope we tend on the whole – and with very little convincing required to overcome what minimal (and liminal) barriers to our gullibility that might exist – to mistake the order we find as being meaningful, objective, […]
Reductive abstractions in explanatory systems serve very well to ground those systems in self-validating (if demonstrably incomplete) logic, and possess considerable power and compelling reasons to believe them. Observe the thread of Turing‘s abstraction arrive in the (perhaps inevitable) artefacts, entities and exceptional utility of cloud computing – the simulated computing machines of various kinds: […]
Context: Four philosophers who realized they were completely wrong about things The article referenced above is an interesting, if spectacularly shallow, reflection on conceptual about-faces in philosophy. The deeper lesson and message here is not so much that these particular – if diverse – philosophical, political or theological world-views (and their proponents) found themselves in […]
We do not wear these mercurial masks anywhere near so much as they wear us, we do not inhabit these digital cultures anywhere near so much as they inhabit us, and we do not lose anything by casting aside our reflexive aspirations to ordered patterns of control so much as ordered patterns of control lose […]
Context: In 2020, let’s stop AI ethics-washing and actually do something The most mystifying aspect of this ethical issue is that, on a quick survey of available literature, the emphasis is clearly on “fixing the technology” but leaves as conspicuously absent any concerted attempt to “fix our societies” even though these are in fact the […]
Context: Covid-19 has blown apart the myth of Silicon Valley innovation A key and core critical issue is that, even as the hyper-inflating representational information and knowledge matrices we inhabit find themselves piling specialisation upon specialisation and complexity upon complexity, the underlying (and arguably – overarching) factors that bind – and effectively unify – those […]
Context: Strong Yet Brittle: The Risks of Digital Authoritarianism There are quite probable logical and (by extension, mathematical and) distributed material or socioeconomic, not to mention strategic, senses in which a strict adherence to unwavering and inflexible closure and continuity must necessarily create the conditions of inevitable, eventual and/or accelerated structural disassembly or decline. A […]
Is it really so? Is ICT or any other language and hyper-extended (or reflexive) cognition really the limit of our world? That would surely to be to assume that that world – any world – was in some aspirational sense bounded, complete, even if only by, in or of itself; but the language, the grammar […]
Consider the many ways that the cyber arms-race is precisely this – a procedurally-incremental measure, counter-measure, counter-counter-measure. The hyper-inflating combinatorial possibility space of attack and defence as a gestalt creates it’s own momentum and self-propagating, patterned structure(s) and open or extensible system(s). The evolutionary nature of this process is inescapable. Each act of interdiction then […]
In the search for knowledge and wisdom it is very often what is hidden that is more useful than what is revealed. While we value what we understand and what utility we might obtain from it, the vast and plausible infinity of that which we do not (and can never) know is the defining logical […]
Not so much “in the belly of the beast” as she is orchestrating the mechanism and behaviour of her own projected monsters. Similar observations might be made of humanity in gestalt: we find ourselves inadvertently consumed by these malevolent machines and embodied technological architectures of our own manifest fear. Art by Will Murai
A contemporary proliferation of fools is not half as terrible as their common access to digital communications platforms through which they might channel, diffuse and disseminate their compound and stagnant simpleton’s craft of remedial unknowing. In waving these great banners of stupidity, they seek to bludgeon rationality, intelligence and civilisation itself into humble (and submissive) […]
Daedelus Kite 