Kairos Media

“Nobody… nobody trusts anybody now. And we’re all very tired. There’s nothing else I can do. Just wait.” — The Thing, directed by John Carpenter, 1982 Toward the end of Part II, I mentioned Australia’s “News Media Bargaining Code” of 2021. I won’t recount for you here the complete history of that Act; suffice it … Read more

Mother, did it need to be so high? — Roger Waters, “Mother”, The Wall, 1979 In its first Annual Information Form for investors to treat “Digital” as a distinct revenue category, the Free Press‘ parent company boasted that “[t]raffic grew by 48 per cent, based on page views, in 2009. [winnipegfreepress.com] currently attracts about 100,000 … Read more

Education is ideally civil defense against media fall-out. Yet Western man has had, so far, no education or equipment for meeting any of the new media on their own terms. Literate man is not only numb and vague in the presence of film or photo, but he intensifies his ineptness by a defensive arrogance and … Read more

You are already familiar, I have no doubt, with the phrase “to boil a frog“. According to the story — and you know this bit, too — if you plop a frog down into a pot full of boiling water, then that frog will simply hop right back out again. But if you were to … Read more

“Automation and cybernation can play an essential role in smoothing the transition to the new society… The computer can be used to direct a network of global thermostats to pattern life in ways that will optimize human awareness. Already, it’s technologically feasible to employ the computer to program societies in beneficial ways… There’s nothing at … Read more

…Now, the story that I want to tell you began in 1971, in the middle of the year. I’d been going around, using this model that I have explained to you, in big companies, in agencies, in all sorts of places. And then I suddenly got a letter which very much changed my life. It … Read more

Welcome back. For those of you just joining us, I ended Part I where Stafford Beer’s Designing Freedom begins, in a “little house… in a quiet village on the western coast of Chile”. With the benefit of history and hindsight, we now know that Beer was describing the town of Las Cruces — but we’ll … Read more

“Let me tell you some things I find productive. Positive reinforcement. Negative reinforcement. Honesty. I’ll tell you some things I find unproductive: constantly worrying about where you stand based on inscrutable social clues, and then inevitably re-framing it all in a reassuring way so that you can get to sleep at night. No, I do … Read more

“Speak not to me of blasphemy, man, I’d strike the Sun if it insulted me! Look ye, Starbuck: all visible objects are but as pasteboard masks. Some inscrutable yet reasoning thing puts forth the moulding of their features. The White Whale tasks me; he heaps me. Yet he is but a mask. It is the … Read more

“Thus was I, sleeping, by a brother’s hand,Of life, of crown, of queen at once dispatch’d:Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,Unhous’led, disappointed, unanel’d;No reckoning made, but sent to my accountWith all my imperfections on my head.O horrible! O horrible! most horrible!If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not.” — The Tragedy … Read more