Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence

The umwelt connotes the particular perspective of a particular organism: its internal model of the world, composed of its knowledge and perceptions.

Understanding the nature of this interrelationship is vital to understanding our own entanglement with the more-than-human world.

As we expand our field of view, we come to realize that everything impacts everything else – and we find meaning in these interrelationships.

In this sense, politics, when organized, is also a kind of technology: the framework of communication and processing which governs everyday interaction and possibility.

Nevertheless, the power of network theory, and perhaps more importantly the idea of universal, scale-free networks, is that it allows us to appreciate these forms in ways we were incapable of doing before. This is a gift from the technological to the ecological: a way of seeing and thinking the natural world which emerges from the things we have cr

Thus symbiosis provides one of the most powerful, empirical counterpoints to all our horror stories about the development of opaque technological infrastructures, of systems of analysis, determination and control, of dangerously asymmetrical intelligences and power relationships. It simply doesn’t have to be this way and, moreover, it doesn’t want

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 t

how are we changed by encountering non-human senses and a non-human impression of the world?

The lens required now is not a microscope, but a macroscope: a device for seeing at a far vaster scale – both in space and time – than we are used to.

Intelligence is one among many ways of being in the world: it is an interface to it; it makes the world manifest.