Re: <nettime> Speculative Intergalactic Network

[Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com>]

Forget the aliens. If you read Liu Cixin's Three Body Problem, you don't
want to communicate with them.

On 2018-01-12 12:19, Sean Cubitt wrote:
> would it be more useful/interesting to establish communication with
> planet Earth? “If a lion would speak, we would not be able to
> understand it” (Wittgenstein) but it is clear that lions (rivers,
> forests, oceans, reefs, animals etc) do speak; but that we refuse to
> listen.

I totally agree with this. And wouldn't it be a great collective project
to devise new ways of listening.

This, it seems, has two parts. First is to find ways of translating
their speech into something that we moderns, raised on science, can
understand. There, I think, we are making great progress as we cover the
world with sensors to give us an intimate understanding of processes
within local ecosystems at a global scale. It's not just that we can
individualize animals by tracking and recording their unique paths
through life, but can make trees tell us on a daily basis about the
state of their metabolism over twitter. And perhaps not with ants but
with bees, we know pretty well how and what they are communicating among
themselves. But we still poison them knowingly.

Because listening in a more meaningful way also means coming to terms
with what is being said and adapting one's behavior to it. This, of
course, is what we are refusing, individually, but more importantly,
collectively. There are rare exceptions, such as the recent granting a
river in New zeal legal personhood.

The new ways we are currently inventing to make make non-humans speak to
us, are, in my view, necessary but insufficient as long as we are not
willing to listen deeply.

Felix





-- 

 ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| http://felix.openflows.com
 |OPEN PGP:  https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?search=0x0C9FF2AC
#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: