Cultural ecology for a posthuman world

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We are cyberneticists, death doulas, radical listeners, brand strategists, and drifting clarifiers. We are consumers of data, consciousness adrift on a sea of information, improvisers applying deeply ingrained creative techniques to whatever comes to hand. We are bricoleurs and clutchers at straws. We do things that artificial intelligence cannot yet do.

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AnOutsideAgency is a mechanism to promote heuristic cultural ecology in a posthuman world. 

Anthropocentrism is a destructive self-deception. In the Real world, humanity does not perch above all other living species at the apex of a pyramidal hierarchy that places our needs and desires above all else. Indeed, anthropocentrism is the reason we are poised on the brink of irreversible transformation and unprecedented self-harm.

The Real does not care for our needs and desires, and if we do not drastically revise our behaviour, we will soon become a footnote in its story. We live, and have always lived, in a more-than-human world. But our actions have ensured that we now live in a posthuman world that, although it is visible all around us, we strive wilfully not to see.

But the future is not set in stone and there is more than one version of the posthuman world.

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In James Bridle’s most hopeful vision of the future – Ways of Being – the dawn of the posthuman era is the point at which anthropocentrism is revealed, and generally accepted, to be a destructive self-deception. In this scenario, ‘posthuman’ does not mean ‘life after humans’ in the sense that there will be no humans at all; rather that humanity (including emerging digital cohabitants of the planet) understand that respecting non-human – or more-than-human – life is necessary for the survival of humanity.

This is actually quite a straightforward idea, although it can be difficult to grasp if you’re accustomed to taking an anthropocentric view of the world. The environmental crisis is the most obvious and pressing reason to switch to a post- or more-than-human agenda because this catastrophe has arisen as a direct result of rampant anthropocentrism. As Bridle explains, there is no way out of this crisis without learning from the abundant sources of more-than-human intelligence that surround us, as well as harnessing the (presently) less-than-human (and potentially other-than-human) intelligence embodied by our digital tools.
There are two ways out of environmental crisis – as there are two ways out of every crisis: transformation and death. Bridle’s prescription is for harmonious transformation in partnership with more-and-other-than-human intelligences: a posthuman world in which we know – and take – our rightful place alongside (in solidarity with) the countless non-human citizens of our planet. Bridle’s vision of a posthuman world is a recipe for life.

The alternative is death. Not necessarily an instant, cataclysmic snuffing out of humanity, but a slow, painful slide into irrelevance, invisibility and – ultimately – extinction. In this scenario, ‘posthuman’ really does mean a world without humans… sooner or later. 

Before that point arrives, the portents of a posthuman world will become even more visible than they are today. The three Contemporary ‘horsemen of the apocalypse’ are: capital, data and ideology. Perhaps, in much the same way that despair is the eighth and deadliest sin, it is also the fourth horseman – the daddy of them all and analogous with death itself.

The key point to make about these heralds of the apocalypse is that, having always existed as ‘real’ bogeymen in the collective human psyche, they flourish and take on a life of their own in a posthuman world that ignores Bridle’s call for mass ecological thinking and denies the embrace of other-than-human intelligence. 

Capital, data, ideology and despair are entities that exist in all versions of posthuman reality, but in Bridle’s they take their rightful place as subservient to the greater project of harmonious coexistence, while in the posthuman death scenario they have risen to become the dominant forces in society – self-sustaining causes and symptoms of our failure to recognise that we already live in a posthuman world. All we can do now is decide whether we want to live in Bridle’s difficult, selfless and sustainable version or capitalist realism’s easy, selfish and unsustainable version.

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