Categories
cybernetics

AI & Language

We are collectively navigating a technologically-mediated inflection point and communicative phase transition in which runaway acceleration of dissipative processes (i.e. explosive decompression) are dramatically reshaping how we engage with and understand humanity’s core operating system of language. AI is not simple but in this context it is simply an interface, as is intelligence. Recursively self-propagating […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Smart Weapons and Stupid Wars

It is only because we are quite astonishingly and catastrophically unable to end wars that we find ourselves in so very many ways and for so very many different reasons still fighting them. We have refined our sharpest technological insights as a function of conflict and the intertribal dissonance that our species specialises in. What […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

The Invasion Game Ends Really Sadly

Context: Seeing today that Russia might next invade Lithuania, some thoughts occur… While Putin is surely not the only unrepentant misanthrope at work here, Ukraine and all possibilities beyond remain his invasion, his war(s), and his bumbling catastrophe that seek in such imperialist atavism some kind of narcissistic self-aggrandisement. The brutal psychology of tribal warlords […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Our Tribalism is Endemic but Silly

How to alienate and enrage 99% of the world? Tell them that almost all of their contemporary cultural practices, beliefs, interests, hobbies and pastimes are shallow, superficial assertions of tribal identity that do little more than provide temporary comfort in an ultimately hostile, selfish and uncaring world. It is not that these cultural practices and […]

Categories
Philosophy

Ignoring Truth for Temporary Happiness

The most mystifying truth of all is that we live in a world that defines value and success in such limited terms, as being little more than successfully replicating the patterns and conventions of behaviour and thought that we encounter and through which we learn to play a game of simple (or – often enough […]

Categories
Psychology

The Power of the Collective

The mystery of this “power of the collective” is not in the overt presence or tidal, cultural and narrative-psychological force it compels. It is in the many and diverse ways that individuals bound together by information, communication and shared experience or role find themselves as bearers of a meaning and a message which is hardly […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Instagram Influencers

Human beings copy each other, it provides a modest respite from implicit psychological insecurities. They copy each other copying each other because they are tribal creatures and for all this aspirational social or cultural identity construction – they are all so easily led, swept away by trends and peer pressure or commercial desperation. After a […]

Categories
Psychology

Institutional Bullying as Behavioural Reflex

Questions could be asked of whether institutional contexts inadvertently invoke bullying, cognitive dissonance and tribal dominance behaviours. Like arguing on social media, people are unconsciously driven in this direction, psychologically and behaviourally “shaped” by their context.

Categories
Alien Anthropology Philosophy

Self-Propagating Miracles

It is the strangest thing that all of this exists.  The unlikely arrival in the Cosmos of any of this human world is profound.  Our world, our cultures and all of our myriad differences and similarities – it is a wonder and peculiarity in all of the vast immensity and silent, unknowing turbulence and mindless […]