## Metadata - Author: [[James Bridle]] - Full Title: Ways of Being - Category: #books ## Highlights - The science fiction writer Charles Stross likens our age of corporate control to the aftermath of an alien invasion. ‘Corporations do not share our priorities. They are hive organisms constructed out of teeming workers who join or leave the collective: those who participate within it subordinate their goals to that of the collective, which pursues the three corporate objectives of growth, profitability, and pain avoidance,’ Stross writes. ‘We are now living in a global state that has been structured for the benefit of non-human entities with non-human goals.’ ([Location 316](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=316)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Darwin had only recently returned from his voyage aboard HMS Beagle. It was another twenty years before he would publish On the Origin of Species, and another ten before he would explicitly include humans in his theory of evolution, in The Descent of Man, in 1871. However he was already thinking, and writing in secret, about the similarities between men and apes. He returned twice to the zoo in subsequent months, bringing Jenny small gifts each time – a mouth organ, some peppermint, a sprig of verbena – and each time he was astonished at her responses. ‘Let man visit Ouranoutang in domestication … see its intelligence … and then let him boast of his proud preeminence,’ he wrote in his notebook. ‘Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy the interposition of a deity. More humble and I believe true to consider him created from animals.’ With these words, Darwin seems to acknowledge that his own recognition of non-human intelligence was foundational to his development of evolutionary theory: a startling conclusion, given the many subsequent ways his theory has been misused to justify human superiority. ([Location 789](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=789)) - Note: Darwin wrote these words decades before origin of species - The mirror test soon became the standard test for self-awareness, and over the years many different species have been subjected to it. Humans generally pass the mirror test at around eighteen months – with some important exceptions we’ll get to shortly – and this evidence of self-awareness is regarded as a key milestone in childhood development. But like many such cognitive tests, its main effect is to reinforce the sense of a dividing line between ‘higher’ and other animals, rather than to suggest any sense of shared kinship: we decide who ‘passes’ the test, and can thus claim the elevated state of subjecthood, and who does not. As within human society, we’d rather extend the in-group sharply and grudgingly than acknowledge that there are multiple ways of behaving and being intelligent, many of which trouble our existing methods of classification. ([Location 820](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=820)) - Faces might just not be that important at all in the thinking of other species, or at least have very different significance, and so approaches like the mirror test, which reproduce humans’ own obsession with faces reflected in the mirror, are simply inappropriate. ([Location 939](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=939)) - The appreciation of outer behaviours tends inevitably towards a sensitivity to inner lives – and, in time, Smuts felt a change in her own sense of identity. ‘The shift I experienced is well described by millennia of mystics but rarely acknowledged by scientists. Increasingly, my subjective consciousness seemed to merge with the group-mind of the baboons. Although “I” was still present, much of my experience overlapped with this larger feeling entity. Increasingly, the troop felt like “us” rather than “them”. The baboons’ satisfactions became my satisfactions, their frustrations my frustrations. ([Location 1144](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=1144)) - The attempt to force the world to conform to our portrayal of it, and the friction this attempt generates in our lives and societies, is behind the great malaise of our age: widespread confusion, shading into anger, rage and fear. It is the result of trying to find truth and meaning in a single world, a single box into which we cram all the contradictions and paradoxes of reality. But in truth, there are so many worlds. ([Location 1423](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=1423)) - The reason we have so much difficulty understanding what plant intelligence might consist of is precisely because it is so different to our own. One obvious objection to the idea of plant intelligence is that plants don’t have brains. Yet one of the strengths of plants is precisely that they have no central, irreplaceable organs. Plants are modular – they can survive losing 90 per cent of themselves, and many species can reproduce from broken pieces, or cuttings. In particularly harsh environments, like deserts, cuttings are more successful than seeds for raising new generations, which is why many succulents are particularly good at this kind of reproduction. Modularity creates resilience: fetishizing particular organs, as animals do, obscures such abilities. Rethinking what intelligence might be also allows us to rethink the modes and mechanisms which might produce it, and thus to come up with new ways of being intelligent. ([Location 1557](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=1557)) - The earliest plants were mere agglomerations of cellular tissue, lacking roots or leaves or any of the specialized structures we recognize in plants today. They were the descendants of simple marine algae which washed ashore and found some purchase on beaches and cliffs, sustaining themselves through photosynthesis alone. But around 400 million years ago – at least, that is the date of the oldest fossils we’ve found – these proto-plants began to associate with fungi: to evolve lobes and fleshy organs to house mycorrhizal partners. This is the origin of all plant roots: questing limbs in search, not of food itself, but of partners in the process of producing life. Plants and fungi don’t merely interact underground, they penetrate one another. Parts of fungi actually live within the cells of plants, and they form in effect an extended root system, more than a hundred times longer than the roots of the plant itself. And these fungal strands, called mycelium, extend everywhere and through everything. What we take to be the soil itself is actually part fungus – somewhere between a third and a half of its living mass. ([Location 1591](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=1591)) - This relationship between fungus and plant is symbiotic: each depends upon the other. As the mycologist Merlin Sheldrake puts it: ‘What we call “plants” are in fact fungi which have evolved to farm algae, and algae that have evolved to farm fungi.’ ([Location 1600](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=1600)) - A new Copernican trauma looms, wherein we find ourselves standing upon a ruined planet, not smart enough to save ourselves, and no longer by any stretch of the imagination the smartest living things around. Our very survival depends upon our ability to make a new compact with the more-than-human world, one which views the intelligence, the innate being, of all things – animal, vegetable and machine – not as another indication of our own superiority, but as an intimation of our ultimate interdependence, and as an urgent call to humility and care. ([Location 1689](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=1689)) - In 1999, an American biologist called Ford Doolittle tried to draw a new tree of life, taking into account the latest discoveries in HGT.33 He called the result a ‘reticulated tree’ or ‘net’, although it resembles more a thorn bush or thicket. Eschewing the graph’s traditional two-dimensionality, branches bend and shoot out, merge and separate, hug one another closely and poke through holes. Life appears curious and questing, networked, sprawling and particularly inclusive. ‘Different genes give different trees,’ wrote Doolittle, meaning that genetic evidence could no longer support the model of distinct species, or even kingdoms. ‘To save the trees’, Doolittle conjectured, ‘one might define organisms as more than the sums of their genes and imagine organismal lineages to have a sort of emergent reality – just as we think of ourselves as real and continuous over a lifetime, while knowing that we contain very few of the atoms with which we were born.’ Ford Doolittle’s reticulated tree. In this vision of life as an ongoing process of emergence, he echoes Lynn Margulis, who considered the human individual ‘a kind of baroque edifice’, reconstructed every couple of decades by fusing and mutating bacteria. Meanwhile, the core of our being, the backbone of our DNA, is far older than any human who ever lived. ‘Our strong sense of difference from any other life-form, our sense of species superiority’, wrote Margulis, ‘is a delusion of grandeur.’ ([Location 2178](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=2178)) - Models of progression, advancement, linearity and individuality – models, in short, of hierarchy and dominance – collapse under the weight of actual diversity. Life is soupy, mixed up and tumultuous. Muddying the waters is precisely the point, because it’s from such nutritious streams that life grows. The individual, under the microscope or under the sun, is always a plurality. Models of multiplicity are needed to make sense of this endlessly proliferating, teeming, oozing and entangling life. The tree is not a tree, but perhaps a bush, or a net – or a forest, or a lake. Or maybe a cloud? ([Location 2199](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=2199)) - Symbiosis is not a vision of perfect harmony – far from it. The world is not composed of harmonious or even equitable relationships, but it is composed of relationships, and more of those are mutually beneficial than they are antagonistic. ‘Life’, writes Margulis, ‘did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking.’ ([Location 2224](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=2224)) - For Huxley, conscious attention is a prerequisite for acting correctly and with justice in the world: only by looking and listening carefully might we fully understand what is going on around us, and know how best to proceed. ([Location 2247](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=2247)) - To ‘circumnutate’ means to bend or move around in an irregular circle or ellipse. It is a motion caused by variations in the speed of growth in different parts of the plant, and is the mechanism behind most plant movement, including Mimosa’s. It’s nutation that causes leaves to bend or flatten out, and petals to furrow and curl. Circumnutation – a gentle upward and outward spiralling – is the characteristic movement of growing plants, performed by everything from pea shoots to oak seedlings, as well as mushrooms and the hyphae of fungi. Being the first gesture of awakening, questing life, it seems to presage all other movements, including our own. It is a nodding turn, a greeting to the environment, an opening ceremony or a blessing to the four directions: Hello, world. ([Location 2517](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=2517)) - There are always other ways of doing technology; other ways of thinking it and other ways of putting it to use. The only constraint is our imagination, and our intent. What other worlds might we discover if more of our technologies were consciously, thoughtfully employed – pointed, not at one another, but at the more-than-human world? The gap between the time-lapse photography in my living room and the imaging of the whole Earth and the wider Universe from space seems vast, but it is really just a question of scale, intent and imagination. ([Location 2664](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=2664)) - قلب is a Turing-complete language, meaning it is capable of implementing all existing computer programmes and includes a complete Arabic interpreter and programming environment – the tools for running and writing code. Like Arabic, it is written left to right, and all keywords – usually English terms such as ‘loop’ and ‘function’ – are replaced with meaningful Arabic equivalents. By time-honoured nerd custom, the standard test for a programming language is to write a short programme which prints the phrase ‘Hello World!’ This is ‘Hello World!’ – or rather, ‘مرحبا يا عالم’ – in قلب: (قول ’مرحبا يا عالم‘‏) قلب was created by a Lebanese-American programmer and artist called Ramsey Nasser, specifically to ‘highlight the cultural biases of computer science and challenge the assumptions we make about programming’. As all modern programming tools are based on the ASCII character set, which encodes Latin characters and is based on the English language, programming is tied to a particular written culture and favours those who grew up within that culture. Nasser argues that the goal of increasing computer literacy – and thus, rebalancing systemic power – requires the availability of tools in multiple languages. In addition, قلب demonstrates how altering the language of code can also change its nature. ([Location 3118](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=3118)) - Computers, as we have already noted, are made from stone, and the compressed relics of animals and plants. Over aeons of geological processes, bodies, trunks and stems have been rendered into oil, and in a fraction of that time rendered into plastic compounds to support the silicon hearts of our machines. Computers themselves are one of the words spoken by stone. ([Location 3351](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=3351)) - When we speak, we take in the atmosphere and expel it again; we ingest the world and make it resonate. By speaking, we partake in the world, and the world partakes of us. This is true, also, of other forms of speech: the cry of birds, the scratching of crickets, the wind in the trees, the rumble of stone. Speech exists between bodies and beings; it has no place, no use, in a universe of inanimate objects. Speaking presumes hearing: by speaking, we acknowledge and animate the personhood of the listener. We make each other into persons; we transform things into beings. Speaking to others, then, is how we begin to make a more-than-human world. ([Location 3390](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=3390)) - We mistake our immediate perceptions for the world-as-it-is – but really, our conscious awareness is a moment-by-moment model, a constant process of re-appraisal and re-integration with the world as it presents itself to us. In this way, our internal model of the world, our consciousness, shapes the world in the same way and just as powerfully as any computer. We attempt to make the model more like the world, and the world more like the model, at every step of our intra-action. This is why models and metaphors matter. If our internal model contains a vision of a shared world, a communal, participatory world; if it acknowledges the reality of our more-than-human entanglements; and if we’re prepared to adapt our vision to new circumstances and new realizations, then it has – we have – the potential to actually make the world a more communal, more participatory, more just and equal, and more-than-human place. MONIAC was a simulation machine which became a decision machine. This is the way in which all (successful) computation operates. First, it models the world, and then it attempts to replace the world with the model. Our minds, too, are simulation machines which become decision machines: we think, process and act in constant intra-action with the world. The question, then, is what are the characteristics of models – and thus of machines – that make better worlds? ([Location 3968](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=3968)) - I would humbly propose three conditions for better, more ecological, machines: machines better suited to the world we want to live in and less inclined to the kinds of opacity, centralization of power and violence we have come to understand as the hallmarks of most contemporary technologies. These three conditions, I believe, are necessary for machines to become part of the flourishing communities of humans and non-humans we’ve sketched out in previous chapters. Our machines should be non-binary, decentralized and unknowing. ([Location 3978](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=3978)) - Non-binary, decentralized, unknowing – what all three conditions of this negative theology of technology have in common is that they are concerned with dismantling domination, in all its forms. To be non-binary, in human and machinic terms, is to reject utterly the false dichotomies that produce violence as the direct consequence of inequality. A culture of binary language splits us in two, and makes us choose which parts of ourselves fit existing power structures. To assert non-binariness is to heal this divide and to make different claims of agency and power possible. To decentralize, in this context, means to empower and grant agency equally to every actor and assemblage in the more-than-human world, so that none may have dominion over any other. To be unknowing means to acknowledge that – like Socrates before the Oracle – neither we nor anybody else knows exactly what is going on; and to be humbled and at peace with that understanding and thereby with everything else. Technologies of control and domination become instead technologies of cooperation, mutual empowerment and liberation. These are, of course, not merely technological or ecological goals: they are political ones too. Any technological question at sufficient scale becomes one of politics. ([Location 4078](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=4078)) - The Athenians believed that the principle of sortition was critical to democracy. Aristotle himself declared that: ‘It is accepted as democratic when public offices are allocated by lot; and as oligarchic when they are filled by election.’ ([Location 4175](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=4175)) - It could be said that the unconscious goal of computation since its instantiation has been to rediscover and remake its connection to the uncomputable. In order to remake our societies and render them fit to face the systemic challenges of the present, we need to heed this lesson, rediscover our connection to the more-than-human world, and integrate the uncomputable into our own ways of thinking and relating. We can start with randomness. ([Location 4588](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=4588)) - The deployment of true randomness – often perceived as the opposite of informed, enlightened decision-making – in complex, politically sensitive debate might seem paradoxical. And yet, as we have seen, it is precisely this mechanism which has yielded the greatest flowering of novelty and creativity across computation, scientific research, artistic endeavour and evolution itself. To fail to heed its potential to press upon on our most powerful lever for making change in the world – politics – would be to ignore the central lesson of our tools, technologies and encounters with the more-than-human world. ([Location 4660](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=4660)) - When Ferdinand II added the Kingdom of Castile to his Kingdom of Aragon, becoming the first de facto King of Spain, he acknowledged that ‘cities and municipalities that work with sortition are more likely to promote the good life, a healthy administration and a sound government than regimes based on elections. They are more harmonious and egalitarian, more peaceful and disengaged with regard to the passions.’ Sortition is not a solely European invention; neither has it always been administered by, or held captive by, the aristocracy. In the rural villages of Tamil Nadu, a system of governance called kudavolai dates back at least to the Chola period, over a thousand years ago. Its mechanism involves writing the names of committee candidates on palm leaves and then having a child pull them out at random. It is still in use in regional elections today. In North America, sortition was used by the Iroquois Confederacy, or Haudenosaunee, a political association of five nations originating around 1100 CE and lasting well into the colonial period until driven off its lands by European settlers. Led by female clan heads, the Confederacy preferred to operate through cooperation and consensus (the word ‘caucus’ comes from an Algonquin word meaning an informal discussion without the need for a vote), but when a vote was called for, it followed the principles of sortition. This ensured that all the clans were represented equally and that none could achieve dominion over any other. The Iroquois Confederacy was probably one of the healthiest and most equitable societies of its time, in terms of wealth distribution and access to resources. Its ideas are believed to have influenced Benjamin Franklin, who had personal dealings with the Confederacy, and therefore the modern Constitution of the United States. ([Location 4672](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=4672)) - The experience of sortition and the value of cognitive diversity, together with the examples of the power of randomness and the stories of the agency and intelligence of the more-than-human world which we have gathered in this book so far, point us towards a dual realization. First, that the most creative and profound solutions to the most serious, knotty, systemic problems that we face can only be addressed through the application of radical cognitive diversity: the entrainment of the widest possible range of embodied viewpoints and experiences that we can muster. We must also recognize that cognitive diversity extends beyond the human, that it inheres in the intelligence of non-human animals, the organization and agency of forests, fields and fungi, the vibrant efflorescence of slime moulds, gut bacteria, and even viruses. To exclude such entanglements from our political decision-making and problem-solving processes is not merely to maintain our practice of extractivist violence and speciesist totalitarianism towards other forms of life, with devastating consequences for our own survival. It is to wilfully ignore the wildly creative, evolutionary lessons of randomness itself. ([Location 4691](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=4691)) - Randomness assigns value to everything and everyone it touches by giving each participant equal weight: everything is equally valuable. In this, randomness is inherently political and inherently empowering. Randomness means and makes sure that every thing matters: I matter, you matter, we all matter together. And this ‘mattering’ is an active verb: by paying attention and giving power to each constituent part of the assembly, we become together, in Karen Barad’s sense of intra-action, everything bouncing off everything else and becoming more as a result. Randomness increases intra-actions. Each and every thing matters; everyone matters. ([Location 4699](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=4699)) - Animals consistently strive to escape their predicament and, if possible, to obtain some influence over it. Theirs is a struggle against exploitation, and as such it constitutes a political activity. ([Location 4806](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=4806)) - Politics, at heart, is the science and art of making decisions. We commonly think of it as the stuff done by politicians and activists, within the framework of national and local government, but really it is the mundane, everyday business of communal organization. Any time two or more people have to make an agreement or come to a decision, politics is at work. ([Location 4808](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=4808)) - Even if we say that we want nothing to do with politics, we don’t really have that option. Politics affects almost every aspect of our lives whether we want it to or not and, by definition, it is the process by which almost anything at all gets done. In this sense, politics, when organized, is also a kind of technology: the framework of communication and processing which governs everyday interaction and possibility. ([Location 4814](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=4814)) - Hribal’s assertion that animal resistance to captivity constitutes a struggle for liberation is thus very significant, because it is an argument for political inclusion made not from the perspective of begrudging human awareness and acknowledgement of animal intelligence, but from the active engagement and resistance of non-human animals themselves. It’s vitally important therefore to understand that the more-than-human world is not a place devoid of social and political activity, but one in which complex decision-making, consensus-building and concerted action are already present and enacted. ([Location 4823](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=4823)) - While buen vivir takes its inspiration from indigenous belief systems, such as those of the Aymara peoples of Bolivia, the Quichua of Ecuador and the Mapuche of Chile and Argentina, it represents more than the opposition of traditional knowledge to modern thought. Rather, writes the Uruguayan scholar Eduardo Gudynas, ‘It is equally influenced by Western critiques of capitalism over the last 30 years, especially from the field of feminist thought and environmentalism.’ The practice of buen vivir does not require a return to some sort of imagined, pre-Columbian past, but a synthesis of those historical ideals with a progressive, contemporary politics – as seen in the buen vivir-inspired social movements of South America, or New Zealand’s accommodation of Crown law to Māori cosmologies. It’s precisely this becoming-together of diverse cosmologies, legal structures and even technologies which has the most chance of generating new frameworks for justice, equality and ecological flourishing. ([Location 5057](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=5057)) - At the very least, meaningful legal consideration of AI would yield a concrete definition of what constitutes an autonomous system – a definition, in turn, which might be very useful to the lawyers arguing for animal rights. Recall Judge Truitt’s description of Happy the elephant: ‘an intelligent, autonomous being who should be treated with respect and dignity, and who may be entitled to liberty’. If we’re going to talk seriously about the autonomy and rights of non-human animals, we must also speak seriously about the autonomy and rights of intelligent machines. The two go hand in hand, and the benefits will accrue to both. ([Location 5150](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=5150)) - Throughout the history of human society, the improvements in our collective lives have been driven by an increase in the set of people we see as fully human and whose problems we consider real. This is a political truth, but also an ecological one. Ecology teaches us that we exist by virtue of our ties to one another and to the more-than-human world, and that those ties are strengthened, not weakened, by the inclusion and equal participation of each and every member of that network. The strength and resilience of computational networks, the inherent power of distribution and interconnection, teaches us the same. As humans we benefit from the extension of political rights to non-humans, just as we benefit from all our encounters with the more-than-human. The world we want to live in, the only world we can live in, is one in which rivers and trees, oceans and animals, survive and thrive, in order that we can survive and thrive too. Political agency is a powerful tool for asserting this possibility. And in the long run, it will be clear that we will survive and thrive in an age of intelligent, autonomous machines by making the same assertions. The role we imagine for non-human animals determines the kind of world we too will have in our shared, more-than-human future. ([Location 5156](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=5156)) - The implications of our entanglement with other beings cannot be ignored when it comes to our political actions. Legal representation, reckoning and protection are founded upon human ideas of individuality and identity – but these are anathema to an ecological accounting of the more-than-human world. They may prove useful when we take up the case of an individual chimp or elephant, or even a whole species, but their limits are clear when we apply them to a river, an ocean or a forest. A plant has no ‘identity’, it is simply alive. The waters of the earth have no bounds. This is both ecology’s meaning and its lesson; we cannot split hairs, or rocks, or mycorrhizal roots, and say: this thing here is granted personhood, and this thing not. Everything is hitched to everything else. ([Location 5260](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=5260)) - We cannot know the effects of our actions on others, so there is no way to justly write the laws which govern them. The enactment of a more-than-human politics calls explicitly for a politics beyond the individual, and beyond the nation state. It calls for care, rather than legislation, to guide it. ([Location 5270](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=5270)) - Thus the most urgent political work we must do within the more-than-human world does not involve the adaptation of our existing systems of law and governance to account for them better, although this is important work. The real work will always take place outside of such systems, because its ultimate aim is their dismantling. Like the resisting orang-utans in the San Diego Zoo, our demand is not that we are recognized by the state as existing – we exist already – but that we are truly free to determine the conditions of our existence. And that ‘we’ is everyone – every singing, swaying, burrowing, braying, roiling and rocking thing in the more-than-human world. ([Location 5278](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=5278)) - What is left to us, then, when by admitting to the agency and autonomy of more-than-human life we have undermined our existing systems of governance to such a degree that they no longer function? It was there all along in Kropotkin, who first identified a precursor to human politics in the practice of mutual aid among animals. Its name is solidarity. That is the name we give to that form of politics which best describes a yearning towards entanglement, to the mutual benefit of all parties, and sets itself against division and hierarchy. To declare solidarity with the more-than-human world means to acknowledge the radical differences which exist between ourselves and other beings, while insisting on the possibility of mutual aid, care and growth. We share a world, and we imagine better worlds, together. Solidarity is a product of imagination as well as of action, because a practice of care for one another in the present consists in resisting the desire to plan, produce and solve. Those are the imperatives of corporate and technological thinking, which bind us to oppositional world views and binary choices. Active, practical care resists certitude and conclusions. Rather, this kind of solidarity with the more-than-human world consists in listening and working with, in mitigating, repairing, restoring and engendering new possibilities through collaboration and consensus. It is the result of encounters, not assumptions, and the repudiation of human exceptionalism and anthropocentrism. ([Location 5284](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=5284)) - Ultimately, it’s not about granting animals personhood, but about acknowledging and valuing their animalhood – and their planthood, their subjecthood, their beinghood. It’s about allowing them to be themselves, while working with them to structure the world for the benefit of all of us. We must think not on the scale of laboratories and courtrooms, but on the scale of forests, mountain ranges, tundra, oceans and continents – on the scale of projects like the Yukon to Yellowstone conservancy. ([Location 5577](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=5577)) - This is what a more-than-human politics actually looks like: the careful and conscious attention to the needs and desires of others, the acknowledgement of their agency and value, and the willingness to adapt our existing structures of society and place to better account for all of us. This is more-than-human solidarity in practice and, as promised, it comes with benefits – and questions – for all of us. ([Location 5630](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=5630)) - The ICARUS system extends the scope and range of animal tracking once again – beyond radio and beyond GPS. Because of the weight of even the smallest GPS transmitters, animals weighing less than 100g can’t carry them, meaning that some 75 per cent of bird and animal species – and all insects – have remained invisible to digital data collection. And GPS collars and harnesses, despite improvements, are still prohibitively expensive for many applications.14 ICARUS changes all of this: its lightweight, solar-powered tags can be fitted to a much greater range of creatures, with a corresponding increase in the number of animals we can track, monitor – and listen to. If such efforts are tied to real attempts to improve the lot of non-humans, then the extension of this legibility is in effect an expansion of suffrage. The more non-humans who join the internet of animals – and perhaps one day of fungi, plants, bacteria and stones as well – the more votes are counted, the more voices join the demos, and the wider and more equitable our more-than-human commonwealth becomes. ([Location 5638](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=5638)) - In 2020, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea was subject to revision for the first time since 1982. While the Convention already included provisions for marine protected areas – swathes of the ocean off-limits to fishing or large ships – these are based on fixed locations, and unchanging boundaries. But as Professor Sara Maxwell, a marine biologist at the University of Washington, points out: ‘Animals obviously don’t stay in one place – a lot of them use very large areas of the ocean, and those areas can move in time and space. As climate change happens, if we make boundaries that are static in place and time, chances are that the animals we are trying to protect will be gone from those places.’ ([Location 5661](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=5661)) - One thing that became evident from these experiments was that you need many sources of data, many connected animals, to make accurate predictions. The kinds of behaviour that suggested an oncoming tremor wasn’t visible at the level of a single animal: it only became apparent when the data was aggregated. We are stronger, and more skilled and knowledgeable, when we act collectively, even if we don’t know it ourselves. ([Location 5690](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=5690)) - The internet of animals also shows that we don’t need to throw away everything we’ve learned about complex technology; we can repurpose it. Because of the different ways that different animals react to natural phenomena, according to their size, speed and species, the ICARUS team found it necessary to use particularly complex forms of analysis to pick up on the differences in the data generated from different tags at different times – a welter of subtle and subtly variable signals. To do this, they turned to statistical models developed for financial econometrics: software designed to generate wealth by picking up on subtle signals in stock markets and investment patterns. I like to think of this as a kind of rehabilitation: penitent banking algorithms retiring from the City to start a new life in the countryside, and helping to remediate the Earth. From spy satellites to face-detection algorithms, the tools which currently conjure oppression and inequality can be turned around and put to beneficial uses. ([Location 5693](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=5693)) - Achieving the aims of a Half-Earth – and other projects which will be necessary to maintain life on this planet – cannot be accomplished without a struggle. No great change in human affairs has ever been achieved without one party giving up some or all of their power, and in the struggle for an equitable, more-than-human future, it is the whole of humanity that is on the side of power. But this position is ours to reject, and the rewards of doing so will be great and glorious, particularly if it is beauty and diversity, change and possibility, rather than power and domination, that we seek to embrace. ([Location 5753](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=5753)) - ‘One word: poetry. That’s what the world has to offer us,’ wrote Wilson in 2020. ‘A whole series of mysteries, of possible discoveries, of phenomena, of unexpected events, and objects, and things, and living organisms and so on. An infinitude, almost, on this planet, waiting out there to be enjoyed. There’s so many of this in the world waiting to be explored, and savored, and described.’20 Wilson calls this hopeful urge ‘biophilia’: the belief that people have an innate affinity for other species. I call it ‘solidarity’, the word that for me expresses both a deep love for the Earth and everything in it, and a practical politics of mutual respect, aid and support. ([Location 5758](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=5758)) - I confess, I’m surprised that one answer to the question, ‘how do we stop technology separating us from the natural world’ turns out to be sticking tiny digital sensors on everything. But perhaps I shouldn’t be. After all, if we can tune military radars to observe the migration of birds, or turn spy satellites around to learn about the origins of the universe, then we can put the tools of surveillance to work to build a more-than-human parliament. ([Location 5770](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=5770)) - What I think I’ve come to understand, more deeply than ever before, is that the enemy is not technology itself, but rather inequality and centralization of power and knowledge, and that the answer to these threats are education, diversity and justice. You don’t need artificial intelligence to work that out. You need actual intelligence. But more importantly, you need all the actual intelligences – every person, animal, plant and bug; every critter, every stone and every natural and unnatural system. You need a crab computer the size of the world. The problem is never technology itself; after all, remember, the computer is like the world. ([Location 5774](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=5774)) - I remain as excited as ever about the power and possibilities of computers and networks as I have ever been; I just abhor the structures of power, injustice, extractive industry and computational thinking in which they are currently embedded. But I hope I’ve shown, to some degree, that it doesn’t need to be this way. There are always other ways of doing technology, just as there are other ways of doing intelligence and politics. Technology, after all, is what we can learn to do. ([Location 5779](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=5779)) - Plants have learned to mine metals. Perhaps one day they will invent phones and computers too: they have all the materials they need. Or perhaps we will build something better together. In March 2021, researchers at MIT announced they had taught spinach to use email, which it used to warn them of explosive materials in the soil, leached from ageing landmines. The reality is somewhat more prosaic, but far more interesting. What they had done was engineer the spinach to change colour in the presence of certain chemicals, and then used cameras and computers to detect and transmit this information. Nonetheless, the experiment revealed the abilities of all kinds of plants to be, as one researcher put it, ‘very good analytical chemists’, and showed how to use technology to help them communicate their findings. ([Location 5839](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=5839)) - The world is a computer made out of crabs, infinitely entangled at every level, and singing, full-throated, the song of its own becoming. The only way forward is together. ([Location 5862](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=5862)) - The science fiction writer Charles Stross likens our age of corporate control to the aftermath of an alien invasion. ‘Corporations do not share our priorities. They are hive organisms constructed out of teeming workers who join or leave the collective: those who participate within it subordinate their goals to that of the collective, which pursues the three corporate objectives of growth, profitability, and pain avoidance,’ Stross writes. ‘We are now living in a global state that has been structured for the benefit of non-human entities with non-human goals.’13 ([Location 316](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=316)) - Tags: [[blue]] - قلب is a Turing-complete language, meaning it is capable of implementing all existing computer programmes and includes a complete Arabic interpreter and programming environment – the tools for running and writing code. Like Arabic, it is written right to left, and all keywords – usually English terms such as ‘loop’ and ‘function’ – are replaced with meaningful Arabic equivalents. By time-honoured nerd custom, the standard test for a programming language is to write a short programme which prints the phrase ‘Hello World!’ This is ‘Hello World!’ – or rather, ‘مرحبا يا عالم’ – in قلب: (قول ’مرحبا يا عالم‘‏) قلب was created by a Lebanese-American programmer and artist called Ramsey Nasser, specifically to ‘highlight the cultural biases of computer science and challenge the assumptions we make about programming’. As all modern programming tools are based on the ASCII character set, which encodes Latin characters and is based on the English language, programming is tied to a particular written culture and favours those who grew up within that culture. Nasser argues that the goal of increasing computer literacy – and thus, rebalancing systemic power – requires the availability of tools in multiple languages. In addition, قلب demonstrates how altering the language of code can also change its nature. ([Location 3119](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNFFDQJ&location=3119))