Rich people shitting on poor people isn’t news. That’s history. That’s the shape of it. Empires, estates, banks, data farms—it’s all the same system, just re-encoded. The mechanisms change—feudalism becomes finance, whips become wage contracts, enclosure becomes copyright—but the structure doesn’t. Power aggregates. Wealth consolidates. And the people underneath are expected to be grateful for […]
Would you have preferred to have had rich parents? It should matter to you that wealth is not conjured miraculously from nothing and that the cost might not always be obvious but it is always there. Poverty only exists because wealth does.
Imagine, if you will, a king. A mighty ruler, a keen follower of Machiavelli and thus feared much more than loved and very clever indeed. Of course, being clever is only ever measured by the breadth and depth in which intelligence is defined and this king had come to live in a half-mirrored world of […]
All civilisation is built upon the toss of a coin.
One thing that appears as something of a universal property of human behaviour is that we define ourselves much more by negative experiences than by or through positive ones; regardless of the extent to which we might prefer to maintain positive affirmations and self-perceptions – the darkness looms large in our imaginations. Most shared (national) […]
The greatest irony of every instance of civilisation collapse has probably never been that it comes without warning or time to avert impending catastrophe, as even then when disaster looms it is never entirely unexpected or unforeseen by those bearing sufficient intellect to observe its impending arrival. It is much more likely that we will […]
Art requires inauthenticity just like wealth requires poverty. The issue is that wealth and all associated power is of necessity a narrowly-focused exclusive, dissipative system that, like a tornado, maintains coherence and continuity through offsetting its own cost and entropy to an environment composed of poverty and disempowered, disenfranchised multitudes. Wealth foundationally depends upon the […]
Aesthetics is not only about the appraisal and critical assessment of beauty in art or any other form. It is also an analysis of sensory experience, of perception. Perception is directly related to assessments of beauty, of symmetry and of value and inflates our experience with judgements – both known and unknown, recognised and unacknowledged. […]
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 […]
Money is the crux of our shared existential crisis – and yes, regardless of the extent to which you are willing or able to admit this: it is a crisis, it is ongoing and it is the status of any adaptive system that is subject to an evolving momentum through entropy towards complexity. We store […]
Beyond the self-evident inadequacies of our integrated bureaucratic hierarchies, the labyrinth of systemic biases which have funneled wealth into corporate welfare and monopolistic hegemonies are now revealing their utter ineptitude at providing adequate socioeconomic resilience. You could ask why no one saw this coming. Many people did, they just did not know what shape or […]
On a summer Saturday road trip, listening to a song (“Crazy Circles“) by old rock band Bad Company and the lyrics caught me mid-thought on a topic of entropy and political power: “Life is just a game of chance.” While it is true that life is fundamentally random and the large-scale statistical drift into patterns […]
Daedelus Kite 