Categories
Philosophy

The image in the mirror is the machine…

Observe how the image in the mirror of all of our aspirational self-definitions is the machine, logic, the structured and ordered grammar of a game, a recurring pattern and design or, most overtly in our globally interdependent information and communications networks: an algorithmic sequence. The fantasy of truth, of certainty (beyond that which can be […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Digital Transformation and Cultural Bottlenecks

Organisations are information and energy-processing systems. Information and energy-processing systems are autonomously oriented (via physics, logic, mathematics) towards low energy states. This orientation or endemic systems -bias towards low energy states bridges inanimate and living systems but may be considered to have obtained a special status in living systems. The differentiator of life in this […]

Categories
systems

The Shadows of Entropy

It is a truth almost universally known but rarely, if ever, acknowledged that the strengths and the values of our world are simultaneously its weakness and qualitative (as much as quantitative) poverty. Contemporary communications systems have, for instance, been truly wonderous – they have brought us all closer together through near-instaneous text, voice and video […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Miracles, Magic and Advanced Technological Civilisations

The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, marble, life-size, 1647-1652.   Bernini captures the dramatic moment an angel pierces her heart with the arrow of Divine love.  It was Saint Augustine who suggested that miracles do not happen in opposition to nature but in opposition to what we understand of nature.  In a similar vein, […]

Categories
technology

“Centaur” Human/AI Teams to Guard Nasdaq

The Nasdaq will now be protected by a centaur team of human analysts and deep learning systems. The broader context of autonomous network and data system defence is clearly an accelerating arms race. If there is sufficient perceived benefit to be derived to offset the cost of development, which – as the pursuit of profit […]

Categories
technology

Cyber Security and Governance: to Centralise or not to Centralise?

Cyber security is a fascinating and rapidly evolving problem-space. What possible solutions exist in regards to coordinated governance and oversight? If a centralised software and hardware development methodology iss used – compliance to formal standards could be assured but the (logically and materially inevitable) emergence of vulnerability and exploit would mean that this systemic coherence […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Monday mornings…

…a vast and yawning abyss of commuter futility only partially masked by the endless distraction of engorging ourselves on information artefacts, channels, opinions, fiction and repetition. It is as though we can not even savour our loneliness and feelings of dispossession or pointlessness at all of this cyclical and directionless repetition. The cognitive landscape of […]

Categories
communication culture technology

Engaging Fake News: Information Security, Journalism and Artificial Intelligence

Here is some interesting content on the topic of identifying fake news and media content Verifying online information: The absolute essentials. Related to this – AI is rapidly becoming proficient at generating compelling, targeted falsehoods and dissimulating sources across diverse media artefacts, channels and contexts.  In information security there is a turn towards entirely automated […]

Categories
culture

Taxonomies, Marmalade and Technology

Taxonomies, the branching logic of binary algorithms and decision-trees that – as though by the stealth of cultural (and commercial) entrainment and that generally unwitting human self-obsession which rarely notices that the rising tide and hyper-inflating menu of choice has become anything but an augmentation of freedom – have flooded us with logical paths and […]

Categories
communication Philosophy technology

The Necessity of Proliferating Vulnerabilities: a General Philosophy of Cyber Security

Compressed: It is something of an inevitability of both logic and of physics that the more components a material system has – including the diverse and recombinatory abstractions and logic of algorithmic, information and energy-processing (i.e. computational) systems – the more disordered states of entropy that are also possible, indeed – probable within and as […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology Philosophy

The Reflexive Isolation of this Digital Life

The more technology connects us, the more it isolates us and the more these tools of information and communication allow us to define ourselves and our lives, the more uncertain they leave as to who we are and what (if any) purpose we have in life.  We do not use information technology so much as […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Broken Machines

The image in the mirror of the world is that limited comprehension and linear system by which we might successfully (or at least partially) render our own selves. Taking our own projected image and anachronistic mechanical logic of causal intent or purpose as being a self-evident and unquestionable intuition of the way the world functions, […]