[Image ID: The cover for the Farrar, Strauss, Giroux edition of James Bridle’s ‘Ways of Being.’]
It’s hard to pin down the thesis of James Bridle’s Ways of Being, published today in the USA by Farrar, Strauss, Giroux — it’s a big, lyrical, strange and inspiring book about the “more than human world” — a world that encompasses the worldview of animals, ecosystems, and software.
[Image ID: A photo of James Bridle’s ‘Autonomous Trap 001’ installation. It depicts a compact car in an empty parking lot, inside two concentric salt circles, the inner circle is a solid line, the outer circle is a dashed line. The photo is taken from a high point overlooking the parking lot, and encompasses rolling green hills and distant snowy mountains in the background.]
Bridle, an English artist and technologist who lives in Greece, pulls on so many threads to tell this tale. Some will be familiar to people who encountered some of his viral work, like the homemade self-driving car he “trapped” in a salt-circle that simulated the unbroken lane-markings the car was trained to respect.
[Image ID: A still from the now-deleted Youtube children’s animation ‘BURIED ALIVE Outdoor Playground Finger Family Song Nursery Rhymes Animation Education Learning Video,’ depicting two rows of cartoon characters such as Elsa, Spiderman, Venom, Hulk and the Joker; the forward row has been buried up to its necks.]
Or his investigation “Something is wrong on the internet,” which revealed a vast web of incredibly disturbing children’s animation and programming, much of it automatically produced, that had taken over kids’ Youtube and was absorbing billions of hours of viewing time worldwide:
These are two of the threads woven into Ways of Being: that two “inanimate” objects — a homebrew self-driving car and a recommendation algorithm — both have distinct worldviews (Bridle uses the cybernetician’s term umwelt) and these worldviews create desires, which impact us.
The impact is bidirectional. Our own umwelt and desires impact these inanimate objects, too; we are inextricably tangled up with them. Their actions result from our actions, and our actions result from theirs.
This dynamic doesn’t stop with recommendation systems or autonomous vehicles. The whole world — from microscopic organisms that are neither animals nor plants to birds to primates, to plants and the fungi that interpenetrate and coexist with their root cells — is part of this phenomenon.
Indeed, the interconnectedness of everything is so profound and so undeniable that any close examination of any phenomenon, being, or object leads to the inescapable conclusion that it can’t be understood as a separate, standalone thing, separate from everything else.
This kind of abstract claims of interconnectedness aren’t new, but Bridle ranges far and wide to find concrete and marvellous ways of illustrating it. Many of his examples come from cybernetics and computer science, describing the ways that computers transcend their limits when they are combined with noncomputers. These examples range from random number generators that use lava lamps as seed values to analog computers that use actual water to model fluid dynamics to computer-human collaborations.
But these technological examples lead smoothly to examples from the natural world, where Bridle finds a wealth of category-confounding phenomena, including things that can only be called “language,” “democracy,” “negotiation,” and even “intelligence.” These examples include elephants and tree roots, far-ranging wolves and river watersheds.
Bridle wants us to understand that our convenient categories are not just useful handles that empower us to grab onto abstract concepts — they also limit us, by forcing us into umwelts that are walled off from the most powerful, useful ways of relating to the rest of the world.
One of Bridle’s most provocative moves is mixing of the natural and the technological worlds, which he pulls off in a way that is implausibly convincing. Computers are actually a very good way of understanding nature. The models of networks that we built after the emergence of the World Wide Web turn out to shed light on the webs of nature that had been right there all along.
New technological endeavor, such as machine learning systems, likewise illuminate concepts that have been missing from our understanding of the natural world. The fact that we can build systems that we can’t interrogate or fully understand — but still find useful — is a way of settling the most troubling aspect of the collapse of our categories argued for in the book’s first half.
Finding ways to co-exist with systems we can’t fully explain or control — finding ways to collaborate with those systems — is an ancient idea, one that connects well with indigenous ways of being and ancient animist practices. It’s also the underlying premise of cybernetics — the use of feedback mechanisms and sensors to understand the wider world.
Sometimes cybernetics seeks to steer the world — in the same way that a beaver builds a dam, or a First Nation uses controlled fire to tend to ancient forests, or the way that we build seismic dampers into our tall buildings. But just as often, cybernetics simply seeks to accommodate the world, the way livestock run away from a volcano before it erupts, or the way a First Nation moves from a summer settlement to a winter one, or the way we respond to weather forecasts by changing our weekend plans.
Thus, drawing on cybernetics, Bridle builds a bridge to the “more than human” world, where a kind of personhood can be imputed to machines, the environment, animals, and plants — a personhood, moreover, that can never be separated from our own.
Bridle argues that every time our human societies has expanded their view of personhood — of the right of something to be respected on its own terms, rather than because it is beneficial to “real” people — everyone has benefited. The extension of personhood to enslaved and colonized people, to women, to children, and, in limited ways, to animals, was universally beneficial.
Again, Bridle moves from this abstract idea to a broad swathe of concrete examples. One of my favorites is the story of the Gitmo iguanas. For decades, the people whom the US government has imprisoned and tortured in Guantanamo have been denied access to the US courts. US government lawyers argue that Gitmo is outside of the jurisdiction of US law, and thus a place where humans have no right to legal protections.
That started to change in 2007, when Reuters reporters tipped off detainees’ lawyers to the fact that Guantanamo soldiers were prohibited from harming the endangered iguanas on the base, subjected to penalties under the Endangered Species Act. This led the detainees’ lawyers successfully arguing to the Supreme Court that Gitmo was within US legal jurisdiction.
Bridle describes this as “the iguanas speaking for the humans,” or, more prosaically, the decision to protect iguanas — not because we find them pretty or delicious or useful, but because they deserve rights on their own terms — increased the protections for people, too.
Ways of Being is a book that argues against systems of control and category, and for systems in which everything is understood to be connected to everything else, valuable both on its own terms and because we are part of it and it is part of us.
It’s a book that doesn’t come to a crisp articulation of this thesis, because it is a book that argues against crisp articulations themselves. It is broad and weird and complicated, delightful and poetic. At one point, Bridle recounts how, during a lecture, he briefly and radiantly understood quantum mechanics. It was a transcendant but fleeting experience.
At many points in Ways of Being, I had similar experiences — moments of illumination and understanding. In retrospect, I find myself struggling to describe these moments. But that is Bridle’s point, after all. The inability to define the universe is, in the end, a feature and not a bug.
