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

The mechanism which underlies this effect is called ‘cognitive diversity’, and is often summed up as ‘diversity trumps ability’. This is the theory, backed up by social and mathematical research, that the best solutions to knotty, complex problems are best found by starting from the greatest number of different viewpoints and experiences – that is,

Technology is the last field of study to discover its ecology. Ecology is the study of the place we find ourselves in, and the relationships between its inhabitants, while technology is the study of what we do there: τέχνη (techne), or craft.

For Barad, the entire universe is a continual process of emergence, in which nothing is certain or fixed, but is always becoming itself through its intra-action with everything else.

True randomness is a slippery thing: it is a property not of things in themselves, like individual numbers, but of their relationship to one another.

This realization allows us to begin the core task of a technological ecology: the reintegration of advanced human craft with the nature it sprung from.

Sortition – randomness – was the foundation of radical equality.

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

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.

In short, we must discover an ecology of technology.