What would it be like to watch a baseball game—in London? Imogen West-Knights heads to Stratford, to a stadium in London that’s the home of Premier League football club West Ham, to find out. It’s the Phillies vs. the Mets that day, and over the course of the game, West-Knights observes the “light-hearted bit[s] of cultural exchange” between attendees, and the differences between an American baseball game and, say, a UK soccer (ahem: football) match. She writes a fun, breezy essay for The Dial commenting on the distinct Americanness of the event.
It is nice, I suppose, that you can go for a wander, get drinks or go to the toilet, and not really feel you’re missing much. This is a major cultural contrast, however. Football games are much shorter than baseball games, yes, but even so, you would not catch any self-respecting football fan queuing for any length of time, let alone 45 minutes during the game in order to enter the merchandise tent. But this is what I find several hundred people doing when I leave my seat to go and buy a hot dog. I overhear one woman describing her intention to buy nine T-shirts for her nine grandchildren as she checks the score inside the stadium on her phone.
I decide to postpone the hot dog and instead join the queue for the merch tent, where I meet Caesar, a 43-year-old from the Bronx who’s been living in London for 10 years. This weekend is a complex puzzle of allegiance for him, he tells me. He’s from the Bronx, so he should be a Yankees fan, but his Dad was from Queens via Puerto Rico, so the Mets. He considers himself a Mets fan, but he also supports the Phillies because he went to college in Philadelphia. Yesterday he came in full Mets gear, and he thought about coming in Phillies attire today before remembering that he’d be sitting next to the same people who saw him yesterday, and he didn’t want to be considered some kind of freak. He’s split the difference today by dressing entirely in Puerto Rican baseball player-themed clothes. When we finally get in the tent, I find a Phillies Mets crossover jacket available for $325.
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Cameron Maynard recounts his time as an amateur competitive eater, an attempt to find the emotional fulfillment he sought by eating in bulk for a cheering crowd.
At the time, the “amateur” world of competitive eating—encompassing small holiday events and local restaurant challenges—looked like a way to recapture a sporting life I’d lost, a means of once again reliving the fast-twitch tension of a stolen base, the chest-clattering thunder of a hardwood shuttle run. But food competitions didn’t help wrest back control. If anything, competitive eating became just another way to fold in on myself like a piece of dough, to reframe the consumptive appetites that led to fights, a DWI, and stints of flunking out of college. I was no good to anybody during this episodic decade and a half, but with its trophies and cheering crowds, competitive eating appeared on the horizon like a totem to noble excess, an opportunity to offer up my worst impulses as a virtue-seeking endeavor.
I had grown up on canned food, the kind of peas and green beans that basically disintegrate when you bite into them, and the closest I ever got to a home-cooked meal was my father’s valiant attempt at baked salmon, a smell I still recoil at today. On my mother’s side, we were hyperreligious, the type of churchgoing stalwarts who deny pleasure as a means of penitence. Even though we liked to eat and drink, we denied these feelings and hid them in shame. My mother was the most accomplished at this. The energetic, two-jobbed divorcée could subsist on almost nothing at all, then revel in a banquet of booze, cigarettes, and chili cheese Fritos. Somewhere along the line, I learned this lesson as well: how a person could temporarily stop listening to their body and its pangs of need. I could go days and barely eat, then summon the strength to throw my bones against a wall for a coach’s approval.
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J.K. Nickell | Texas Monthly | June 10, 2024 | 10,640 words
As we all know, the US housing market is a nightmare. Property prices and interest rates are sky-high, rendering the prospect of buying a home unthinkable for many people. Renters face a dire landscape, too: according to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, “affordability conditions are the worst on record.” (I urge you to look at the data in that JCHS link; it’s jaw-dropping.) Policymakers are doing little to remedy the burden of housing costs, even for the most vulnerable, or to protect renters from landlords who—excuse my language—don’t give a crap about the people living under their roofs. But in Dallas, Texas, woe is the landlord who finds themselves on the radar of a local lawyer named Mark Melton. When readers first meet Melton in this superb profile by J.K. Nickell, he’s wearing “a sweat-stained purple Patagonia cap . . . [and] an untucked T-shirt dangled loosely over his jeans.” In my imagination, that T-shirt is emblazoned with the phrase “ENOUGH!” because that, in a word, is Melton’s mantra. Since 2020, Melton has been doing everything in his power to stop unlawful evictions in Dallas County. He’s recruited an army of people to help him—attorneys who literally intercept renters on their way to eviction hearings before justices of the peace, elected public servants who “are not required to have a high school diploma, much less a law degree.” (Seriously?!) These advocates demand that landlords follow the law by, say, providing due notice before kicking someone out of their home. As for lawful evictions, ones based on policies that seem intended to punish people when they fall on hard times, Nickell shows that there’s little reason for hope: renters in Texas shouldn’t expect the law to change soon, if ever. This fact clarifies Melton’s character. He’s a person doing what he can with what he has rather than being daunted by the big picture. It’s not everything, but it’s something—and for the people he helps, it’s a lot. I tore through this story, fueled by admiration for Melton and by rage against Texas’s eviction machine. —SD
Conor Niland | The Guardian | June 27, 2024 | 3,845 words
Wimbledon is a world of Pimms, strawberries, and crisp all-white tennis outfits. It is also a world that revolves around the show courts—Centre Court and No. 1 Court—where the big names play and the crowds fawn. The lower-ranked players battle it out on the courts around the edges of the grounds to a smattering of people: a visual representation of the extreme hierarchies in tennis. Only the top 112 players in the world (plus some wild cards) even make it to Wimbledon. And, as Irish player Conor Niland explains in this stark portrayal, the lower down the ranks you are, the more brutal life in tennis becomes. We often hear about the journeys of the best in the world, but what about those who hover between number 300 and 600, “winning just often enough to keep their dream faintly alive[?]” I appreciate The Guardian running a piece about those who never quite make it into the spotlight—one that shows us how difficult it is if you are talented but not talented enough. Stories rarely told. Niland is certainly not opposed to having a good moan in this essay, but as he reveals poor earnings, exhausting travel, dingy hotels, long waits to play, and never-ending loneliness, you can forgive him. Without people like Niland who fight to climb the rankings, players like Serena Williams and Novak Djokovic would not exist, but it is tough to be a stepping stone for others. This essay will give you a new appreciation for the underdogs who never make it to the top. —CW
Wendell Brock, Paul Kwilecki | The Bitter Southerner | June 26, 2024 | 6,957 words
For The Bitter Southerner, writer Wendell Brock mines photo archives, books, journals, and more to sculpt a satisfying portrait of Paul Kwilecki, an irascible self-taught photographer who had such a deeply emotional response to his hometown that it became the subject for his entire body of work. Brock highlights Kwilecki’s persistence, dedication, and his trust in the process of making art. “The desire and energy to continue year after year come from seeing layer on layer of subject matter peeled back before your eyes, material you didn’t know existed until you penetrated the layer above,” says Kwilecki. “Eventually, you realize the supply is inexhaustible, a lesson in itself, and that how much of it you can exploit depends on your patience and skill.” This piece is much more than a profile of a dedicated photographer, it’s a celebration of art: what it means to make it, and its everlasting influence if you have the courage to keep showing up. I love the slowness of this essay. It meditates, it ruminates. It’s like a slow walk on a beautiful day for no reason other than the joy of the journey. It feels like a fitting tribute to Kwilecki, who captured bits and pieces of Decatur County, Georgia, on film over four decades, giving us an indelible portrait of a place over time. What’s most poignant about this story, and something I will never forget, is that Kwilecki never felt like he fit in, never felt seen. And yet, he spent his entire creative life documenting the people and spaces around him—bearing patient witness. —KS
Ally Jarmanning | WBUR | June 13, 2024 | 3,526 words
We all have our quirky reading obsessions. Mine include poop and eco-friendly death, and—I suppose as an offshoot of the latter—an interest in what might happen to our bodies after we die, intact or not. I debated whether or not to recommend this story, as the thought of trading body parts is unsettling. But ultimately, Ally Jarmanning’s glimpse into this macabre market is fascinating. On Facebook, people openly discuss selling and shipping body parts like they’re items at a garage sale, and if you can believe it, this marketplace is legal—provided that the body part up for grabs is not stolen. That brings us, then, to the case of Cedric Lodge, a man who managed the morgue at Harvard Medical School for nearly 30 years. At some point in his career, he decided to steal body parts from cadavers and sell them to customers. Apparently, no one at Harvard tracked what happened to bodies after medical students had finished their work, and Lodge trafficked body parts for at least four years. As Jarmanning reports, he sold remains to buyers across the US. One collector within this network, Jeremy Pauley, works in the niche field of oddities and has since become the face of a larger criminal investigation. I don’t want to spoil you on all the details, but I’ll say that underneath the grisliness is a thought-provoking piece about property, collecting, and preservation. —CLR
If you’ve seen a Tesla Cybertruck in person, you know that photos can only do it partial (in)justice. It’s massive. It’s massive. It looks exactly like what a seventh-grade boy would draw in his notebook alongside pictures of, like, throwing stars. It looks like it comes with a preinstalled vanity license plate that reads B4D4SS. It looks like a can of energy drink became sentient and watched Starship Troopers without noticing the subtext, then designed a car. Yet, it exists. People own them and drive them down the street, seemingly without shame. Drew Magary is not one of those people. He is also not an automotive journalist. He’s a columnist and a very funny writer who happens to resemble the quintessential Cybertruck owner. And when he rents one, the result is the perfect piece for a hot summer week: short, breezy, and refreshing. “You know how Apple will occasionally confuse the world by doing away with standard features like a headphone jack?” he writes. “OK, well, imagine a car built entirely out of that kind of gimmick.” Magary’s experience with the car is as entertaining as you’d imagine, even when people aren’t giving him the finger simply for driving it. He’s offended by its fighter-pilot steering wheel. He can’t figure out how to turn off the one giant windshield wiper. He nearly crushes himself with the retractable roof. But really, it’s his disdain for Elon Musk and the Cybertruck’s obvious target audience—“the kind of men who use speakerphone on airplanes”—that really animates the proceedings. Writing about people rather than things is where Magary has shined since his Deadspin days, and this piece is no exception. Will it make Cybertruck owners happy? Definitely not. Will it make you happy? Massively. —PR
Audience Award
Congrats to the most-read editor’s pick this week:
In this piece, Luke Winkie asks, “[C]an anyone truly optimize their way back into the good graces of an ex?” The various “get-your-ex-back coaches” on the internet would have you think so. Winkie questions their advice—which boils down to avoiding contact for a while—and asks whether these notoriously expensive “gurus” are taking advantage of people in an emotional state. Another question to consider: should you get back with your ex? —CW
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Every time I see a Tesla Cybertruck in person—which is sadly frequent, since I live in the Bay Area—I have to quash the urge to give it the finger. The people Drew Magary encounters while driving one, however, do not quash. It’s hard to know whether that’s solely because of the cartoonishly aggressive car, or because Magary also looks like the stereotype of a Cybertruck owner. But such questions only distract us from the joy of this piece. If you wondered what people with money to burn and a Mad Max fantasy experience inside these testosterone chariots, wonder no longer.
As for the interior, the Cybertruck is as barren as most other Tesla interiors. I got a big-ass touchscreen, a fighter pilot steering wheel and little more. Tactile pleasures were nonexistent. No buttons. No switches. I felt like I was driving around in an unfurnished apartment. But the truck did have a pleasing strip of white leather trim bordering the interior, which gave me the impression that somewhere, deep inside Tesla headquarters, a person with legitimately good taste fought a battle and actually won it. Also, the gas and brake pedals had a brilliant chrome finish to them, and the seats were both roomy and comfortable, which is a big deal for large men such as myself. This was a far more attractive ride on the inside than out, which was good because I was afraid that the driver’s seat would be covered in iron spikes. It was not. It was a normal seat, and I felt at home sitting in it.
Then I turned the truck on and was instantly escorted back to Elon’s technocarnival of suck.
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For The Bitter Southerner, writer Wendell Brock pored over notebooks and photo archives to create this deeply ruminative and compelling portrait of Paul Kwilecki, a self-taught artist who spent his entire creative life—four decades—documenting the people and places of Decatur County, Georgia.
“But with photography — and his eye for the beautiful and the poignant — he could express feelings that might be impossible to put into words. The process was a way of looking inside his heart, and out onto the world, in an instant.”
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What happens when a prominent Dallas attorney gets ticked off about thousands of his fellow citizens being thrown out of their homes in violation of the law? Courtroom fireworks, for starters. An exquisite, seething profile from J.K. Nickell:
More than 37,000 evictions were filed in Dallas County in 2023, disrupting roughly 8 percent of renter households. That tally doesn’t include untold numbers of unofficial evictions, in which landlords oust renters from their homes without going through the courts. Melton has seen cases in which property owners have smashed a tenant’s electrical box with a sledgehammer, removed a home’s front door with a circular saw, and placed a two-by-four full of nails across a renter’s driveway to pop the tires of the family car. He’s taken a middle-of-the-night call from a twenty-year-old single mother whose landlord had employed gang members to pound on her doors and windows, trying to intimidate her into moving out.
A few years ago, he got word that a complex in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Cedar Crest was trying to evict more than seventy residents. When he showed up at the Volara apartments, multiple residents told him about long-running problems with their gas—they were unable to use their stoves or take hot showers. Melton stormed into the management office and threatened litigation. Days later, he got a call from a whistleblower, a former manager at Volara who made a startling claim about what was allegedly going on: a new owner had ordered employees to do anything necessary to rid the complex of Black residents and replace them with “better tenants.” Melton recorded the call, and he said he later played it in a courtroom, successfully abating the rash of evictions that had been filed. (The city attorney’s office subsequently investigated Volara, which has made significant improvements.)
Melton is quick to note that plenty of landlords in Dallas scrupulously maintain their properties and are patient with tenants who are struggling financially. And certainly some tenants unfairly try to game the system. But, Melton says, “there are a lot of slumlords, and the only message that they are able to understand is a smack in a courtroom.” That single mother suffering without AC at the Rosemont, Melton said, “is a perfect example of the average tenant we deal with, just getting f—ed three ways from Sunday, and with no recourse. Nothing she can do about it. She’s almost breaking down in tears just recounting it.”
When the Rosemont residents’ requests for working AC went unheeded, they appealed to the city. Kevin Oden, the head of Dallas’s Office of Integrated Public Safety Solutions, a crime-prevention unit that operates independently of the police department, deployed a team to investigate. (The complex has “needed good, solid ownership for thirty years,” he said.) That’s when a scrum of code officers descended on the property, a clipboard-carrying battalion in khakis and navy polos. They split up and went door to door, discovering that roughly forty units didn’t have functioning ACs, many more than had been reported. (Tenants are often reluctant to report issues because they fear retaliation from their landlord.) The code officers ticketed the complex for every unit without cool air, and they planned to return in three days to see if the problem had been resolved. “I can’t compel them to do anything today,” a city official lamented.
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Artificial intelligence promises a new dawn of innovation and liberation. Or oblivion. Or simply another profitable hype cycle. It depends on who you ask.
For many, AI helps fuel a faith that technology will deliver us from ecological disaster, even as that disaster takes hold. This techno-optimism is often framed as the foe of the “ecological turn”—a constellation of beliefs that instead see salvation in living more ecologically, as a part of nature.
As usual, this is a false dichotomy: if AI enables interspecies communication, it could actually help facilitate an ecological turn. As an environmental journalist, I’m fascinated by the social and cultural impacts of this possibility.
From King Solomon’s supposed ability to speak with animals to indigenous peoples’ widespread cooperation with other species, the pieces below show communicating with animals to be an ancient human concern. But now, converging scientific and technological advances present remarkable new possibilities. From the mycelial “wood wide web” to smart slime molds and political honeybees, science is demonstrating that humans don’t monopolize language or intelligence. And cutting-edge AI, drone, and sensor technologies are allowing us to interpret non-human communication like never before.
These possibilities contain profound implications for conservation, law, politics, and culture. Non-human communication is already being integrated into environmental management and governance—as Karen Bakker’s pieces below explore. The Rights of Nature movement is securing ambitious legal rights for non-human organisms, like Ecuador’s Los Cedros forest. Scientists, technologists, conservationists, and philosophers are exploring interspecies democracy with renewed vigor. And discussions about what this all means ethically and culturally are gathering pace.
The effects of interspecies communication will depend on how we interpret, translate, and “speak” with other organisms—processes that raise enormous questions. Can technology translate multisensory languages? What is language? Is true interspecies understanding even possible? What are the potential applications, good and bad, of even partial success? Why are we doing this? The pieces below offer a cross-section of the emerging perspectives on these questions.
This New Yorker essay by Elizabeth Kolbert offers another good introduction, in the form of a deep dive into Project CETI: “the most ambitious, the most technologically sophisticated, and the most well-funded effort ever made to communicate with another species.”
This interactive report provides an excellent introduction to the topic, from key technologies and ethical questions to headline projects and possible applications. The Financial Times produces some of the best visual storytelling in journalism, and here audio and graphics bring infrasonic elephant rumbles and synthetic chiffchaff calls to life, conveying technical concepts like spectrograms and embedding spaces. Fascinating details—like lemurs and dolphins getting high—also surface throughout.
The piece clarifies the multi-sensory nature of non-human communication and the resulting challenges. Even if AI can interpret these forms of communication, how might it translate into something human-perceptible? The authors quote Aza Raskin, founder of the Earth Species Project, a non-profit using AI to decode non-human communication:
Maybe the translation ends up not looking like a Dr Dolittle or Google translator where you get specific words, but maybe it ends up as flashes of colour and some sound, and you get a sort of a felt sense of what maybe they mean.
The writing also powerfully demonstrates the potentially seismic consequences of using AI to speak to animals. Cetaceans have transmitted oral culture for around 34 million years, over 10 times longer than humans. Given humpback whales can disseminate a song across the planet within a couple of seasons, attempting to speak to a whale, says Raskin, “may create . . . a viral meme that infects a 34mn-year-old culture, which we probably shouldn’t do.” Shane Gero, the lead biologist at Project CETI, which is working to translate sperm whale communication, agrees:
The last thing any of us want to do is be in a scenario where we look back and say, like Einstein did, ‘If I had known better I would have never helped with the bomb.’
One of the most fraught philosophical and ethical questions involved in interspecies communication is whether humans can ever be sure of correctly understanding another species. This fine piece by Philip Ball explores the seemingly insurmountable obstacles to certain translations, but also the profound value in trying and failing.
Language is an enabler of, and a constraint on, what we can say and even think. Diverse biologies and environments equip organisms with radically different sensory worlds (the scientific term is “umwelten”). Bees see in ultraviolet, for example, and bats hear in ultrasonic. Can unfamiliar umwelten ever be comprehensible to humans? Though AI may help interpret non-human language in meaningful ways, there seems an almost unavoidable risk of projecting anthropocentric ideas and prejudices during translation—of “overinterpreting what we see,” in Ball’s words. He cites the Swadesh list, which contains 215 supposedly universal concepts across languages. Many of its words, he notes, would have no “dolphish” equivalent.
Nevertheless, the most stirring part of Ball’s essay is his eloquent articulation of why it’s still worth trying. Mystery, he writes, is a possible antidote to human hubris:
It may be that the most interesting, revealing part of dolphish is precisely the part that lies outside our own lexicon—which is to say, outside our own minds. If, in fact, we find ourselves unable to fully reconstruct another creature’s mental world, it may be enough just to acknowledge the reality of what we can’t articulate.
In other ways, even basic communication may be of value. Some of our mistreatment of other species is obviously callous and selfish, as in factory farming, but some of it arises from a communications breakdown.
Moreover, Ball writes, “Even the attempt at translation suggests a deepening of respect for [non-humans]—and a willingness to free ourselves from our human preconceptions and prejudices.” Failure could well bring a different form of success: deepening interspecies respect.
This other Noema piece by Bakker makes an excellent companion. It charts the confluence of technologies, including AI-powered whale interpretation, being incorporated into shipping logistics and other marine-governance initiatives.
The late Karen Bakker was one of the world’s leading thinkers on interspecies communication. This essay, on the dazzling linguistic capabilities of honeybees, is one of the essential Noema pieces she wrote on the larger topic.
Bakker opens with an important reminder that interspecies communication long predates AI. She tells the story of pioneering ethologist and zoologist Karl von Frisch, whose work illuminating non-human language won him a 1973 Nobel Prize (and ample opprobrium). Bakker also acknowledges the many indigenous peoples that, long before von Frisch, developed vibroacoustic devices like bullhorns to communicate with bees.
Bakker then traces a string of remarkable discoveries around honeybee communication. Honeybees’ waggle dance, “still considered by many scientists to be the most complex symbolic system that humans have decoded to date in the animal world,” can relay nectar sources miles away. Vibroacoustic research has determined that honeybees can distinguish and recall complex information, and learn and teach skills through cultural transmission. Dr. Thomas Seeley’s research has combined computer vision and machine learning to make other striking discoveries:
Perhaps Seeley’s most startling finding was that, in choosing a new home, honeybees exhibit sophisticated forms of democratic decision-making, including collective fact-finding, vigorous debate, consensus building, quorum and a complex stop signal enabling cross-inhibition, which prevents an impasse being reached. A bee swarm, in other words, is a remarkably effective democratic decision-making body in motion, which bears resemblance to some processes in the human brain and human society.
This research lineage culminated in RoboBee: a robotic bee able to communicate with bees through programmed waggle dancing. “A statistically significant number of bees would follow the RoboBee’s dance and then fly to the specific location that [researcher Tim] Landgraf had coded into his honeybee robots,” reports Bakker. “He had created, in essence, a bio-digital equivalent to Google Translate for bees.”
Bakker’s work engages thoughtfully with potential applications of even rudimentary interspecies communication. Here, she considers how RoboBee might enable smart hives that help bees avoid threats and locate food sources. She also outlines the wider bio-sensing possibilities in decoding waggle dances:
When gathering nectar, bees continuously sample from the environment, so who better to act as a sentinel for environmental risk? Bees and other insects have been successfully trained to detect a range of chemicals and pollutants. Decoding a large number of dances from a specific area could help evaluate landscapes for sustainability and conservation. It could also make pollination more efficient and provide insights into how to ward off the widespread, alarming phenomenon of colony collapse disorder. Bees could also be recruited as live bioindicators: surveying, monitoring and reporting the landscape in a fine-grained, inexpensive way that would be impossible for humans to achieve alone.
But there is a violent shadow to this possible light. The United States military has already started testing bee bio-detectors—what military scientists dub “six-legged soldiers”—for security objectives. This requires “genetic and mechanical manipulation of the bees’ nervous systems, migration patterns, and social relationships,” Bakker writes. She goes on:
To witness biohybrid bees engaging in reciprocal (if rudimentary) interspecies communication gives me a numinous sense of awe. To witness bees being converted into disposable, militarized sensing devices gives me a sense of dread. These two choices are emblematic of humanity’s relationship with nature. Will we choose dominion or kinship?
The notion of idly chatting with a sperm whale elicits sci-fi awe. But what if interspecies communication facilitated joint governance?
Notwithstanding the oppressed worldviews of many animistic indigenous cultures, a steadfast belief in human exceptionalism has long hindered any meaningful consideration of interspecies democracy. But Donaldson and Kymlicka, two thinkers at the forefront of the field, say this is changing:
A century of orthodoxy that viewed animals—from horses to hyenas, from crows to cuckoos—as tightly scripted and instinctive creatures is being overturned. It turns out that many animals are genuinely social and cultural beings—reasoning, norm-complying, and behaviorally flexible individuals who come to be who they are within a particular social and cultural group whose practices are passed down through social learning, not (or not just) instinct.
Science has now shown many animals can learn how “we do things around here,” reinterpret songs and skills, and form political systems that involve voting, deliberating, splitting, and regrouping. Instinct and hierarchy play only a partial role—much like with humans, who are not, it turns out, Earth’s only “zoon politikon.”
Melanie Challenger is a writer and ethicist at the vanguard of interspecies democracy. This poetic Emergence Magazine essay (also a podcast) interweaves personal experience and emergent frameworks.
Donaldson and Kymlicka sketch two dominant strands of thought within interspecies political theory: a conception of non-human organisms as political agents to be represented by humans; and the view that “wild animals should be viewed as self-determining political communities or ‘nations,’ with rights of self-government, territorial sovereignty, or grounded jurisdiction, and that relations between humans and wild animals should be seen on the model of international diplomacy.”
The missing piece, which technologically enabled governance models are starting to explore, is collaboration:
Neither offers a vision of politics as something humans and animals do together. The first insists humans should take animals’ interests into account while continuing to exercise sovereignty over their lives; the second insists animals have the right to exercise their own forms of collective political agency. But neither offers an account of how humans and animals can exercise political agency together as part of shared political communities, how they can be mutually responsive and accountable and coauthor social norms and ideas of the public good.
This last piece zooms out, lest we lose the forest for the trees. James Bridle is an insightful thinker on AI and intelligence. This conversation with Emergence Magazine (also available as a podcast) exhibits his irreverent, thought-provoking perspective on political and philosophical questions around interspecies communication.
For Bridle’s similarly critical assessment of generative AI beyond the context of interspecies communication, this Guardian essay is also excellent.
Bridle begins with a critique of humans’ anthropocentric understanding of intelligence as simply “what humans do.” He argues that although AI should alert us to the possibility of diverse intelligence, we persist in programming and assessing AI along human-centric lines. He instead calls for a multiplicity of embodied, relational, and analog forms of intelligence:
When you try and put everything into ones and zeros, something is lost. What happens in between those ones and zeros is lost, and the result of that is a deep violence, because what is lost is either erased or violently suppressed; because then you’ve started to act in the world according to the model that the computer provides. And you try to make the world more like the model.
Bridle champions listening over knowing and curiosity over control as prerequisites for interspecies kinship:
Once you are prepared to pay attention to [non-human organisms]—and that’s really, really key—once you are prepared to admit the possibility of their intelligence, it becomes almost instantly undeniable. And so the project, really, then is to integrate that awareness into our lives.
Building on the hope he sees in the unfolding ecological turn, Bridle finishes with a powerful vision of a more just technological culture, guided by decentralization, non-binary thinking, and unknowing:
Inter-species solidarity is fundamental to new politics. And it doesn’t require knowing. And by ‘politics,’ more broadly, I mean the ability to think and make decisions together, hopefully for our common benefit. And the politics that best fits that, for me, is this idea of solidarity, which simply starts from the position that you—unknowable you; unknowably, incredibly different you, who I cannot imagine—I still care for you and value you and think you are as important, and I will stand with you. That, for me, is the heart of solidarity. It’s a simple acknowledgment of the value of all forms of life and of our common, shared goals that have to lie at the heart of any movement towards a more just and equal world.
Sam Firman is a freelance writer and editor based in Vancouver, Canada. He writes a newsletter about how we relate to our environments, and how this might help build better systems.
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