The JC’s amateur guide to systems theory
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The great agglomeration.

Every conversation, chat, chat-up line, query, miscued punchline, interrogation, cry for help, every over-protested denial, every wise-crack, every carefully articulated submission, every footnote, every annotation, every throw-away comment; every like, every smiley, every thumbs-up, thumbs-down, chin-scratch emoji, every heart, every helpful, not-helpful, retweet or share — deceased, then stripped, dried out, expired, and gutted.

Gutted of its context, its personal genealogy — its life: these metaphors are dead, expired, shuffled off the mortal coil and with the choir eternal — embalmed, denuded of circumstance, emotional state, timbre and nuance; sanded down and its serial numbers and identifiers removed; genericised, blended and bunched into a warm, brown entropic emulsion that clogs and congeals.

This is the petrol that feeds the engines of big data.

See also