Norman Wilkinson (1878–1971) was a painter who approached war with the instincts of an artist and the clarity of a strategist. Confronted with the silent threat of submarines beneath the waves, he turned not to invisibility, but to bewilderment. His invention of dazzle camouflage transformed warships into bold, fragmented spectacles—each a kinetic canvas of broken […]
It’s not always obvious, but it’s grimly consistent: most dictators and autocrats aren’t clever—they’re just willing to be cruel. A few have enough low cunning to seize a moment or twist a system, but intelligence isn’t the driver. It’s laziness, brutality, and the fact that violence is the fastest shortcut to power if you don’t […]
When reduced to its essence, the simplicity of global conflict is as horrifying as it is absurd.
A thing being as equally and oppositely defined by that which it is not as much as by what it provably is (or consensually appears to be), the absence of its opposite is the simultaneous presence of its psychological, cultural and technologically-mediated self. Facilitated by conveniences of Gestalt illusion, familiar enough to student artists but […]
Humanity has, at scale and en masse, a profoundly insecure dependency on aggressive self-determination. This is the great unaddressed issue of our historical moment, perhaps of history more generally, and may indeed be an undecidable problem. We may not be able to unambiguously determine causal factors or clarify many of the things we really could […]
Context: AI-Enabled Electromagnetic Warfare Systems On a general assumption that algorithmic complexity is primarily a transduction of mechanised conceptual logic into alternate (if perhaps inevitable) dimensions, vectored mathematical invocations and expressions of technical entropy; and, given that recursive self-entanglement is both a cause and consequence of intractable systemic (i.e. logical) incompleteness and material uncertainty, this […]
Luddites, yes, and just as blindness might take many forms, there are so many ways to inhibit the progress of civilisation or work against those creatively seeking collaborative solutions to humanity’s shared existential problems. For some, it becomes a professional if not also political vocation of ignorant bluster and destructive blundering. Analysis is interesting but […]
What if deterrence fails? Here’s a quadruple-shot of caffeine for your Tuesday morning: Every silver lining has a cloud, an occasional series: nuclear science, geostrategic insecurity and civilisation extinction edition. Somewhat, IMHO, more significant than most of the babbling business of communicative noise that sustains social media systems, blogging or vlogging platforms, podcasts, news websites and broadcasters, and yet […]
A theory describes itself and its own history as much as it ever comprehensively communicates or unproblematically renders its object, it sets out to prove that an absence of its opposite is the presence (and truth) of itself. A cunning gambit as the basis for confirmatory self-validation but grounded in this way in an abject […]
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, […]
That the incompetent actions of one person can spark a global conflagration is a matter of the utmost absurdity. This indicates a failure of the intellect so rampantly oblivious to consequences as to be rightly-called “remedial”. On a broader scale, just what does the historical record reveal about the catastrophic fate of autocratic systems that […]
Trauma always begets more trauma and war is a wildfire that no one can control.
Daedelus Kite 