Re: <nettime> Swipe, a Smart Phone Movie by Mieke Gerritzen/Next Nature

[Michael Benson via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Hi Brian, greetings everybody:

With respect, what does this even mean:

>Nature is somehow an Other with whom we must compose.

....?

How could it be "Other," an Other with whom we must "compose," when we are
the result of millions of years of complex, multifaceted, dice-throwing
evolution on this planet? (For anybody tempted to say "no wait,
anatomically modern Homo Sapiens have only existed for 300,000 years," it's
not as though on a Thursday we had Homo Heidelbergensis -- handily named
after a city that wouldn't exist for 298,000 years -- and then on Friday
there emerged Homo Sapiens, AKA "Wise" Humans -- what a risibly
self-regarding self-identification.... Rather a gradual, incremental,
continuous evolutionary morphing transpired, across millennia and extending
all the way back to the first cells.)

And how could it be Other, Nature I mean, when we are so utterly reliant on
the ecosystem that produced us? Isn't it just another peak in the mountain
range of our collective anthropocentric arrogance (I don't mean this
personally Brian) to continue with such an insistence? Or to maintain that
Nature is "somehow" an Other, which amounts to the same thing?

Item: a couple days ago, watching the latest cable news reporting about how
dismally we're handling our exasperatingly destructive dominance of this
planet, I was struck by how the projecting ears and feral wrinkling nose of
the cable news host somehow made him seem irrefutably a representative
Mammal of the order Rodentia, whereas the person he was interviewing -- a
particularly duplicitous representative of a military force that has been
doing a heck of a lot of killing lately -- while also an individual with
fleshy, projective ears, looked somehow squarely centrally cast as a
representative of a clade of Old World simians, albeit a particularly
hairless and skinny ape of the family Hominidae? Sitting in a TV studio on
a rump sans tail?

Item: More than half, to about one half, of your body is non-human. Human
cells make up about 43% of the body's total, with the rest being
microscopic protists or bacterial colonizers. Yep, colonialism! One
estimate has it that a typical Homo Sapiens consists of about 30 trillion
human cells and about 38 trillion bacteria. So where do we draw the line,
between Nature as Other and Human as... Other other?

And that's just the bacterial and single-celled symbionts. Let's talk about
the multicellular ones. You know how you just scratched your eyebrow? Why
did you do that? Most likely, anyway as likely as not, due to human face
mites. Demodex folliculorum or Demodex brevis, take your pick. They live in
your hair follicles and/or sebaceous glands, the latter being those little
oil producing glands connected to individual hair follicles. Domain
Eukaryota, kingdom Animalia, phylum Arthropoda, class Arachnida, order
Trombidiformes, family.... We like to name things, both to attempt
understanding and classification, but also to persuade ourselves we
control, we stand above and are.... Other.

Demodex species live on most mammals, actually, usually without symptoms.
The word derives from two Greek terms, the word for "fat" and the word for
"woodworm." Just to really gross you out. BTW they're 0.3-0.4 mm long and
they like to commute around on your face at night, moving at a speed of
8-16 mm per hour. Half of all adults have them, and 2/3rds of older people
have them. This means you, Nettimers, ha ha.

But don't let it bug you. They're essentially harmless. They merely belong
to the more-than-50% of "you" that's not specifically "you."

Though of course, where do "you" really live? What part of "you" is really
"you," given that most of the "you" presumed to be human is actually the
support system: organs and arteries and corpuscles and ductwork and nerve
endings supporting -- what? Presumably supporting Wherever that Other is
supposed to live. (Even as it also supports the above-mentioned
"individual" ecosystem.)

So where does that Other live? Presumably amongst the circa 86 billion
neurons of the typical human brain?

We are -- material.

FYI a sperm whale has a brain five times heavier than a human brain. But it
doesn't have more neurons. As far as we know, only short-finned pilot
whales (a flat-nosed species of dolphin) and elephants have more neurons.
Both of these species exhibit altruistic behavior, are highly social, take
care of young not their own, and grieve visibly for their dead. Elephants,
for example, shed tears.

Do they belong to Nature as Other, while we do not -- we're exempt?

Of course, none of them have iPhones designed by coddled elites on the
American west coast, and built using semi-slave labor elsewhere, etcetera.
The Smart Phone Movie that started this thread. But somehow sitting here at
this SEM, or scanning electron microscope, looking at dinoflagellate
designs, something I've been doing for the last three weeks almost
continuously for a project called Nanocosmos -- somehow I don't think our
design genius, however noteworthy, is enough to render us Other, and
Nature, which produced us, Other Other.

So here's a new question. Will artificial general intelligence, when it
emerges in like, ten minutes, also be a part of nature? That's a good one:

"When Zarathustra arrived at the nearest town which adjoineth the forest,
he found many people assembled in the market-place; for it had been
announced that a rope-dancer would give a performance. And Zarathustra
spake thus unto the people: I TEACH YOU THE SUPERMAN. Man is something that
is to be surpassed. What have ye done to surpass man? All beings hitherto
have created something beyond themselves: and ye want to be the ebb of that
great tide, and would rather go back to the beast than surpass man? What is
the ape to man? A laughing-stock, a thing of shame. And just the same shall
man be to the Superman: a laughing-stock, a thing of shame. Ye have made
your way from the worm to man, and much within you is still worm. Once were
ye apes, and even yet man is more of an ape than any of the apes. Even the
wisest among you is only a disharmony and hybrid of plant and phantom. But
do I bid you become phantoms or plants? Lo, I teach you the Ubermensch!
The Ubermensch is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say:
The Ubermensch SHALL BE the meaning of the earth!"

Maybe AI is the Next Nature referred to in the subject line?

Best from Ontario,
Michael
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