The animal who is your kin is called your warpiri. In the context of ngurlu, Daly Pulkara explained the meaning this way: warpiri is your “biggest sorry” (your greatest sorrow). In my words, warpiri is YOUR GRIEF. Your flesh and blood, flowing through the bodies of others who will be hunted, is your grief. You don’t have to grieve over everything; you couldn’t. But here, in this place of encounter with the necessary deaths of others, your grief may become extreme and so may your anger. If these deaths come about in defiance of Law, righteous anger is directed to those who have not managed death properly.

With the cybernetization of the world, both the human and the divine are downloaded into a multitude of tech objects, interactive screens, and physical machines. These objects have become genuine crucibles in which visions and beliefs, the contemporary metamorphoses of faith, are forged. From this standpoint, contemporary technological religions are expressions of animism.

The mediated, sentient, and intelligent plant potentially invites us to think about nature, plants, technology, and ourselves-as-humans in different ways. As plants in particular are revealed as agentic, intentional beings, the mediated plant potentially invites us to develop more caring, attentive, and communicative attitudes toward the vegetal. In this way, the mediated plant can push us forward in the urgent “struggle to think differently” that Val Plumwood called us to join. Perhaps the mediated, sentient, intelligent plant can help us to queer nature, to queer botanics, to queer ourselves-as-humans as we “go onwards in a different mode of humanity.” But why to queer? Why not “simply” to “decolonize”?

The Desert does not refer in any literal way to the ecosystem that, for lack of water, is hostile to life. The Desert is the affect that motivates the search for other instances of life in the universe and technologies for seeding planets with life; it colors the contemporary imaginary of North African oil fields; and it drives the fear that all places will soon be nothing more than the setting within a Mad Max movie. The Desert is also glimpsed in both the geological category of the fossil insofar as we consider fossils to have once been charged with life, to have lost that life, but as a form of fuel can provide the conditions for a specific form of life—contemporary, hypermodern, informationalized capital—and a new form of mass death and utter extinction; and in the calls for a capital or technological fix to anthropogenic climate change.

To make machines look intelligent it was necessary that the sources of their power, the labor force which surrounded and ran them, be rendered invisible. —Simon Schaffer If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent. —Alan Turing Metacognition in the Twenty-First Century California Adult The idea that “machines think” displays an unintended solidarity with the animism of less industrialized cultures, which have long recognized autonomous…

This is an image from the Snowden files. It is labeled “secret.” 1 Yet one cannot see anything on it. This is exactly why it is symptomatic. Not seeing anything intelligible is the new normal. Information is passed on as a set of signals that cannot be picked up by human senses. Contemporary perception is machinic to large degrees. The spectrum of human vision only covers a tiny part of it. Electric charges, radio waves, light pulses encoded by machines for machines are…

I will not stop attempting to understand what is most important to a conscious being: (1) subjective continuity of life; (2) its limitlessness in either direction; and (3) its bliss. All this, so to speak, is refuted by biological life on Earth. So as not to succumb to this misconception, we need to look at life from the height of space. Here I present only sixteen theorems of life. Matter is considered to be devoid of feeling by the majority of people. We do not agree with this. That is why…

Many Amerindians believe that animals have descended from humans rather than humans from animals. Within these cosmogonies, in the beginning everything was human. Then the world ended and from that cataclysm the many species, forests, rivers, stars, and minerals were formed. This dispersion ended the mythic state of primordial cannibalism, when everything was undifferentiated and thus ate its own kin in order to feed itself. All these entities, regardless of their species or form, remain…