Darwin provided a proto-description of ecology, describing an ‘entangled bank’, wherein plants of many kinds, birds, insects and other ‘elaborately constructed forms, so different from one another’ were produced by the complex forces of evolution, yet depended utterly on one another.

What we perceive as borders and conflicts – the things which separate us – often turn out not to be artefacts of the exterior world, but immeasurable gaps in our own conceptions, abilities and tools of discernment. We think we are studying the world – but in reality we are merely making evident the limits of our own thinking, which are embodied in

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:

‘We are now living in a global state that has been structured for the benefit of non-human entities with non-human goals.’

Having always been more interested in words on pages and code on screens, I suddenly found myself leaning out of windows to touch the leaves of nearby trees, and stopping in the street to trace, with wonder, the whorls and cracks of living bark.

Climate change is no longer something we can reverse, but something we have to adapt to, cope with and mitigate as much as possible.

If our inability to tell meaningful, actionable stories about our changing planet is part of the problem, then we need to rethink the tools we use to make culture itself. Technology can be part of this communal, sense-making process. In order for this to happen, we need to stop using it as a way to constrain time and enforce our narrow perspective,

A reality in which trees and other plants are in constant, deliberate motion may run contrary to our assumed image of the world, but the recognition of this reality and its absorption into our awareness is crucial to rethinking the world and our relationship to it.

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.