These bits from Ways of Being are somehow in the mulch:
'What counts as technology is also much debated. I like the definition given by the science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin, in a rebuff to critics who accused her of not including enough of it in her work. ‘Technology’, she wrote, ‘is the active human interface with the material world.’ Its definition, for Le Guin, wasn’t limited to ‘high’ technology, like computers and jet bombers; rather, it referred to anything that was produced by human ingenuity. That included fire, clothing, wheels, knives, clocks, combine harvesters – and paperclips. To those who consider technology, whether high or low, to be too complex, too specialized or too abstruse to think fully and clearly about, Le Guin had some words of encouragement: ‘I don’t know how to build and power a refrigerator, or program a computer, but I don’t know how to make a fishhook or a pair of shoes, either. I could learn. We all can learn. That’s the neat thing about technologies. They’re what we can learn to do.’ That is worth keeping in mind as we proceed, because we will be encountering plenty of examples of ‘high’ technology that might seem daunting at the outset – but every one of them has been thought, learned and done by someone who sleeps at night and shits in the morning. We can learn to do them too.'
(This also reminds me of me disliking Shop Class as Soul Craft. Which, I'd forgotten, ends with a reference to the same bit of Le Guin.)
'As we shall see, the subjecthood of which we speak springs up all around us when we consider how we relate to everything else. Being itself is relational: a matter of interrelationships. All that is required for sticks and stones to leap into life, wrote the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, is our own presence. Our human agency and intentionality transforms the objects of culture into subjects, through the meaning we give to them and the uses we put them to. While the machines we are constructing today might one day take on their own, undeniable form of life, more akin to the life we recognize in ourselves, to wait for them to do so is to miss out on the full implications of more-than-human personhood. They are already alive, already their own subjects, in ways that matter profoundly to us and to the planet. In the words often attributed to Marshall McLuhan (but more properly ascribed to Winston Churchill): ‘we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.’ We are the technology of our tools: they shape and form us. Our tools have agency, and thus a claim upon the more-than-human world as well. 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.'
'We have come, as the shock of more-than-human consciousness testifies, to think of ‘nature’ as something separate from ourselves. When we speak of the fantastical futures envisioned by high technology, we speak of a ‘new’ or ‘next’ nature, some utopia of computation which further alienates and supplants the actual ground we came from and still stand upon. It is time to put aside such adolescent solipsism – both for the sake of ourselves and of the more-than-human world. There is only nature, in all its eternal flowering, creating microprocessors and datacentres and satellites just as it produced oceans, trees, magpies, oil and us. Nature is imagination itself. Let us not re-imagine it, then, but begin to imagine anew, with nature as our co-conspirator: our partner, our comrade and our guide.'
'For Epstein, seeing is necessary for knowing and caring, and thus for acting. I would add to this the quality of practice. The act of making time-lapses for myself, whether of my living room or the whole Mediterranean basin, engenders in me an attentiveness to plant and planetary time that I do not gain merely from watching others’ footage on YouTube...Viewing inspires awe, but practice generates knowledge and understanding. The tools of technology, to be effective in producing altered states, require us to be full participants in their revelations, not mere audiences. This is why it’s so important that we are given access not just to the products of all these wondrous technologies – the beautiful images shot by satellites – but to the technologies themselves. What must be made available to all is education in their actual use: the knowledge and know-how to design and deploy them critically and thoughtfully, and real access to existing tools and processes. It is not enough to turn the machines around – to point the satellites outward, rather than at ourselves. They must also be shared out and placed in the hands of everyone.'
'Today, ‘lol’ has escaped the boxes of IM and SMS to become something people actually say: not just a new word, but a new utterance. Unlike ‘haha’ and ‘hehe’, which are onomatopoeias birthed in the convulsion of the human lungs, ‘lol’ is a product of the constriction of space and time in computer systems. It is an environmental effect on language, that supposedly innate human trait which might instead be understood as the world – or, in this case, the machine – speaking through us.'
'I’m just sixty kilometres from the site where I first smelled petroleum on the breeze and learned of plans to use rapacious, corporate AI to crack open and despoil the land, but the journey from one place to another has encompassed gibbons, elephants, giant redwoods and slime moulds; neural networks, non-binary computers, satellites and self-driving cars; the I Ching, the music of John Cage and Sámi joikers, new forms of ancient governance, and herds of GPS-augmented antelope. 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.'