Daedelus Kite

Field Logic, Reflexive Planetary Systems and the Formal Problem of Holism A note on method I have spent several decades studying complex, recursive and self-organising systems.

Fascism does not begin with a dictator.

Failed aptitude can cease to be an accidental selection error and become functionally reproductive for the power structure itself.

A song is never played for the first time.

Desire is peculiar.

Trump depends in part upon the opposing media he seeks to exclude.

[Group Therapy] The mind is not private.

How technology steers meaning in an age of information overload Roll two ordinary six-sided dice often enough and seven will appear more frequently than two.

Abstract Large institutions can become exceptionally accomplished at reproducing themselves while progressively losing the capacity to fulfil the purposes that justify their existence.

The artificial intelligence industry is engaged in an increasingly expensive race to produce more powerful language models.

Geopolitics is a volatile interplay of competing identities, grievances and aspirations, each pursuing some conception of security.

Humanity has always lived at the mercy of the weather, but we have developed an extraordinary capacity to mistake temporary stability for permanence.

Politics is an extraordinarily seductive argument.

On 17 September, Australian students are expected to walk out of school in protest against Pauline Hanson and One Nation.

The technologically mediated communications world increasingly operates as a popularity contest, and in that respect it possesses remarkably little substance beyond the contest itself.

A spider carries something remarkably close to a book inside its abdomen.

Deception matters because it changes what people believe is happening, and that changes what they do.

Language is constituted by displacement, difference, deferral and diffusion: every word acquires meaning only through its shifting relations with other words, contexts, speakers and moments of use.

Crime and punishment appear to be opposites.

Everybody knows the dice are loaded.

Human civilisation has become extraordinarily good at identifying dangers that it appears increasingly unable to stop producing.

In Greek mythology, Ixion murdered his father-in-law and was shunned for the crime.

The uncomfortable thing about contemporary identity politics is not that one side discovered propaganda while everyone else remained innocent.

Religion becomes politically useful when its language begins to do more work for identity than its ethics do for conduct.

The spiritual is not an explanation inserted where knowledge fails.

There is a remarkably efficient pipeline between technology, conflict and money.

Human beings are already entangled beyond any plausible return to separation.

Global communication has become an immense recursive instrument.

Belief and culture are stochastic organisations of recurrence.

Education entrains cognition and interpretation around the prevailing epistemic attractor, supplying the distinctions, categories, methods, vocabularies and standards through which a world becomes intelligible, then returning those it has entrained to that

The title “Diary of a Madman” arrives at Ozzy Osbourne through bassist and lyricist Bob Daisley, who took it from the 1963 Vincent Price film Diary of a Madman, itself substantially derived from Guy de Maupassant’s short story Le Horla, first published in…

Thales, absorbed in contemplating the stars, was said to have fallen into a well while a Thracian servant girl laughed at the philosopher who could describe the heavens but not see what lay at his feet.

Why does any of this matter?

Geostrategy contains a simple trap.

Persistence is a problem of change, not its opposite.

What the fuck are they doing?

1.

An ideology is not best understood as a collection of ideas residing in individual minds.

Homelessness is usually described through what is visibly missing: a house, sufficient income, employment, security.

The AI system is recursively manufacturing the dependencies required to justify its own continued expansion.

Contemporary civilisation is recursively closing around interfaces that reproduce the differences, absences and dependencies required for their own persistence.

Much political speech is almost meaningless if treated as description.

Leslie Lamport’s work on distributed computing gives us a small engineered example of a much larger problem.

The history of knowledge can be read, with only slight exaggeration, as a compendium of errors.

A Theory of Dickheads A dickhead is usually treated as an individual problem.