I finally finished James Bridle's Ways of Being last night. As with his last book, New Dark Age, this is one of the most striking and important books I've read in recent years. It's a fascinating and captivating survey of what it is to be us, and of the particular juncture at which we find ourselves in terms of our relationship to technology, our planet's other inhabitants, and each other. Our misguided, anthropocentric attempts to define intelligence (in our own terms), our poor stewardship of the world and separation of ourselves from animals, our complex relationship with machine which we see as an inevitable monolith -- but is in fact the result of singular, comprehensible choices.
As with New Dark Age, I find something slightly uncanny about reading Ways of Being, inasmuch as it so squarely aligns with a set of interlocking topics which have fascinated me for years. It's both validating and unnerving to see someone else (someone much better equipped to explore and articulate them) working through my same set of preoccupations.
The book has filled me with a lot of thoughts and emotions. A combination of hope and more articulate despair, with both a sharper awareness of how far we are from where I feel we need to be, but also with a clear sense of vision of what that could look like that makes it feel more than theoretical, even if still remote. I've still got some chewing and recapping to do, but it's also snapped into focus some important themes and elements in a couple of pieces of my own work that have been kicking around in loose development for a few years. I look forward to disentangling what I've come away with.