Durban January 25 2019 The First Officer of State, and The First Officer of Government Republic of South Africa I hereby tender an offer to purchase from the state and the government of the Republic of South Africa the parastatals, now in part known as the state-owned enterprises of the Republic of South Africa, in […]
General
Posted inEnvironment, Equality, General, Media, Tech
Metaphors (as models), and our own ‘networked’ existence
In The Prison-House of Language (Princeton University Press, 1972) Fredric Jameson opens the Preface with the following thought-provoking remark (p. v): The history of thought is the history of its models. Classical mechanics, the organism, natural selection, the atomic nucleus or electronic field, the computer: such are some of the objects or systems which, first […]
Posted inEnvironment, General, Media, Tech
‘Searching for an Electric Peanut (part II)’: Jonathan Silverman’s liminal art
Liminality is a strange phenomenon: The Encarta dictionary online defines it as ‘belonging to the point of conscious awareness below which something cannot be experienced or felt’, which is only one of the ways the term is used, but nevertheless gives a good idea of what is involved when you call something ‘liminal’. The point […]
Posted inEnvironment, Equality, General, Health
The dynamics of complex systems: ‘Flight Behaviour’
Most people don’t know what complex systems (the word ‘complex’ is important) are, despite the fact that everyone one is enmeshed in several such complex systems every minute of the day and night. One such complex system is language, which we use more or less all the time, except when we sleep, and even then, […]
Posted inEquality, General, Health, Lifestyle, News/Politics
Breaking down South Africa?
In 2015, it was reported that Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini, speaking to followers at Nongoma, criticised black South Africans for not building further on the country they had inherited from the National Party, opting instead to destroy or break down infrastructure, in this way cancelling out the (economic) progress made during a time when the […]
Posted inEnvironment, Equality, General, Lifestyle
Ag sies man! They took toilet money!
In India, the caste system controls everything, even with the modernisation that has made parts of the caste system illegal. It regulates occupation, vocation, profession and education by determining who gets what opportunity. It determines association, such that the freedom of association is limited insofar as not enabling cross-caste association. In India it is the […]
Posted inEnvironment, General, Health, Lifestyle, Media, Tech
Sleepwalking into a geophysical storm?
In a recent article titled ‘The perils of short-termism: Civilisation’s greatest threat’, by Richard Fisher, he makes the following sober (and sobering) remark about the people — our children and grandchildren — who are likely to be alive when the iconic year, 2100, dawns: All the decisions we make, for better and worse, will be […]
Posted inGender violence, General, Media, News/Politics, Tech
‘Dark technology’ and human ‘nature’ or ‘nurture’?
In the later 19th century there was a protracted debate among thinkers of various stripes about the question, what ultimately determines human actions — ‘nature’ or ‘nurture’ — a debate that is still going on today. But while it was then influenced by the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin, on the one hand, and empiricist […]
Posted inEquality, General, Media, Tech
People are not as free as they think they are
Some (older) people may recall the 1983 Warner Brothers mockumentary, Zelig, written by, and starring Woody Allen, together with Mia Farrow as the psychiatrist who treats him for his strange disorder. Lately I have been thinking a lot about this classic portrayal of conformism on the part of a man who manifested his adaptation to […]
Posted inEquality, General, Health, News/Politics
A world in need of redemption
This morning my two sons and I were having a texting exchange on Skype, while all of us were on our computers and online for various reasons — I was working and chatting to them in-between reading a PhD-student’s latest chapter of his thesis, and at least one of them was working while chatting too. […]
Posted inGeneral, Health, Lifestyle, Tech
‘Pictures at an Exhibition:’ Mussorgsky, painting and Virilio’s ‘grey ecology’
In my previous post, I pondered the work of Paul Virilio on the ‘accelerated’ lives we lead in the early 21st century, and tried to explain what this has to do with the never-ending stream of images bombarding one on a daily basis. What I did not have space to do, was to draw attention […]
Posted inEnvironment, General, Health, Lifestyle
The healthy way to get around our cities
Cape Town, like any urban area, is a city on the move. You can see it in every corner of its 2 461km2 metropolitan area, where 3.7-million people jostle for space on our roads. From Mitchells Plain to Milnerton, Sea Point to Strand, congestion is commonplace and smog levels are rising. Traffic jams mean lost […]