On Ways of Being

I know some reviewers have been a bit skeptical of Bridle’s anecdotes, but that doesn’t stop this from being an incredible book, one that speaks to the Zeitgeist in an upbeat, hopeful way. I first read Bridle around 2018–19, when I took up his New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future in grad school. That was my first real confrontation with the technological developments that have matured over the past few years, AI especially, and it blew my mind — particularly his discussion of “black boxes” and the way technology tries to “see” the world. Ways of Being feels like a natural continuation of it. What began there as a discussion of how technology sees differently than we do has become an involved meditation on intelligence at large, ultimately challenging the assertion that “intelligence is what humans do.” To make his case, Bridle enlists animals, plants, fungi, cybernetic systems, random chance, and even mold — yes, mold — into his warm, fuzzy army.

Some of the chapters blew my mind and elicited the sense of wonder I felt so often as a child and have so lacked in adulthood; his discussion of ape spirituality did this more than anything, but so did his anecdotes about plant communication, about mirroring transportation networks with mold, about Stafford Beer’s hare-brained schemes to run a factory without people. The underlying message is that our anthropocentric worldview is limiting our technological innovation: we keep forcing technology into the same oppressive techniques it’s used for centuries, when that isn’t its only possible use — if we could only expand our understanding of what intelligence is and how it works, by looking at octopi and fungi and random chance, we could build something far more powerful and productive. The book fits the spirit of the age, as left thinkers grow more ecologically minded, and it works well in conversation with Donna Haraway, Timothy Morton, and the Degrowth school, and maybe the literature that engages Deleuze more broadly — he doesn’t get a mention, but I think Deleuze would be impressed by Bridle’s work. This was exactly what I needed to read right now. I have a tendency to get overwhelmed by the rapid global changes directly affecting my life and countless others’, and Bridle offers positive futures to strive for — he offers hope, and the book was really meaningful to me.