WAYS OF BEING: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence, by James Bridle
In a tech environment fixated on systemic disruption, the artist and writer James Bridle (who uses they/them pronouns) has earned a reputation as a disrupter among disrupters. In their writing and artwork — and also at the glossy tech conferences where they often speak —- Bridle holds forth a dark vision of where big tech has actually led us, for all its utopian claims. In their first book, “New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future,” Bridle depicted a world smothering under dark clouds both literal and figurative, a planet whose ecological and structural collapse cannot even be grasped by its people, obscured as it is in a fog of impenetrable complexity. In Bridle’s view, world culture is currently locked in a vicious and deadly cycle, endlessly insisting “on the power of images and computation to rectify a situation that is produced by our unquestioning belief in their authority.” It’s suicide by data, on a global scale.
Bridle’s new book, “Ways of Being,” picks up where “New Dark Age” left off, in a world doomed by our collective twisting of needs and beliefs into inscrutable and largely malevolent systems. “Ways of Being” opens in Epirus, Greece, a rugged and pristine mountain terrain that is home to “bears, wolves, foxes, jackals, golden eagles and some of the oldest trees and forests in Europe,” but which has recently fallen into the clutches of the massive energy company Repsol, and with it the sophisticated artificial intelligence Repsol employs for the speculation and extraction of petroleum. As Bridle walks this mountainous idyll, the Ionian Sea distantly shimmers, but the land is staked and flagged for hundreds of kilometers for imminent drilling, “alien probes, the operations of an artificial intelligence optimized to extract the resources required to maintain our current rate of growth, at whatever cost necessary.”
As in the postapocalyptic fictions of Margaret Atwood or Cormac McCarthy, Bridle’s landscape belongs simultaneously to our ravaged future and our mythic past, and their voice, in these first pages — and in significant portions of the book that follows — comes from this portentous world like a doomsday prophet’s. “We become more like the machines we envisage,” Bridle warns, just as we face “the wholesale despoliation of the planet, and our growing helplessness in the face of vast computational power.” But it is here that Bridle begins to open a route to salvation: By abandoning our limited, Western ideas about what constitutes intelligence, we might look “beyond the horizon of our own selves and our own creations to glimpse another kind, or many different kinds, of intelligence.” In the very world we are destroying, Bridle writes, is “a whole realm of other ways of thinking and doing intelligence,” with which we — and our technologies — must find more symbiotic ways to coexist and interact. “In short,” Bridle declares, “we must discover an ecology of technology.”
