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

connectivity and freedom of movement are among the most vital faculties for weathering the coming storm – for humans and non-humans alike.

Ultimately, it’s not about granting animals personhood, but about acknowledging and valuing their animalhood – and their planthood, their subjecthood, their beinghood.

We learn, change, develop and grow when we move and entangle ourselves with the world in unexpected ways, and we do so best when we are fully engaged participants in that journey, not passive recipients of algorithmic and corporate diktats.

Perhaps the point of technology is not to change us, but to give us the insight and opportunity to change ourselves.

The struggle to ensure the survival of non-human species goes hand in hand with the struggle for dignity and freedom for all humans.

It has been found, in study after study, that random selection from a sufficiently large group of people – given the appropriate contextual knowledge – produces better answers to complex problems than the appointment of a narrow group of experts.

A system of laws and protections developed by and for humans, which places human concerns and values at its core, can never fully incorporate the needs and desires of non-humans.

There is little room for randomness in exploring the vast amount of information actually available to us. This is deliberate. Google and others’ stated mission is to reduce this vast complexity. Their less trumpeted goal is to profit from it, at the expense of our own potential for random encounters, and thereby for our own evolution.

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.