A Is For Another: A Dictionary Of AI

Sympoiesis

By Steph Holl-Trieu

The history of technological development (read: progress) often follows, blinkered and mouth agape, the linear arrow thrown by an incel homo oeconomicus, ivory tower genius, or Selfish Gene. Yet even the incel emerged from the womb of his mother and continues to feed on meals provided by her care. The genius sits in a tower built and maintained by workers. The Selfish gene relies on organisms and groups to carry it forward. No unit of being survives or comes into existence on its own. It is to the detriment of our understanding of life that symbiosis has been largely ignored in evolutionary biology, and we owe much to the scholarship of Lynn Margulis, who foregrounded symbiosis as driving inherited variation — instead of genes being passed down in the cordon sanitaire of random mutations. Life, then, is owed to the intimacy of strangers.

This sits at the core of what Donna Haraway calls ‘sympoiesis’: making-with or worlding with others. Just as in the past algae ingested oxygen-producing cyanobacteria, making photosynthesis their own, futures are made by things—living or inert—that resist death by ingestion or elimination by transformation. The relations that make our world, relations of encounter, exchange, struggle, surrender, war, peace and fusion are contingent; prefigured in the environment of their interaction. Ant colonies, for example, are being studied to identify the algorithms, or rules, that connect local interactions of individual ants to the behaviour of the collective. As Deborah Gordon underlines, these studies call for new vocabularies that transgress the two (insufficient) methods of biology to explain collective behaviour: one, that of single cells working from an internal program adding up to the larger unit of organisation; and two, the whole system functioning as one entity or superorganism. Both options remain blind to the importance of the environment. Gordon’s research, instead, suggests that certain algorithms are likely to be used in specific ecological situations.

Suzanne Simmard uncovers how trees communicate through networks of fungal mycelia, exchanging resources, identifying kin, as well as sending out warning signals. The forest wouldn’t be one without fine threads of hyphae crawling, branching and pulsing underground. Cells, metalloids, Cordyceps fungi, humans, algae, Amazon Alexa, NASA, OpenAI all share the same denominator: they act and reproduce in relation to the world. Life and technology results from collective behaviour – collective behaviour as the formation of patterns deeply embedded in ecology. This requires, as Ursula le Guin explores in her story ‘The Author of the Acacia Seeds’, a different engagement with ecology; a becoming of therolinguists, mechanolinguists, cyberinguists and geolinguists “who, ignoring the delicate, transient lyrics of the lichen, will read beneath it the still less communicative, still more passive, wholly atemporal, cold, volcanic poetry of the rocks: each one a word spoken, how long ago, by the earth itself, in the immense solitude, the immenser community, of space.” (You can listen to le Guin reading from her story here)

Endosymbiosis: Homage to Lynn Margulis, Shoshanah Dubiner, 2012: http://www.cybermuse.com/blog/2012/2/13/endosymbiosis-homage-to-lynn-margulis.html