16 July

I encourage everybody to learn some actor-network theory. Our world is divided by most into two apparently distinct domains. The human, and the ‘technical’. The first has creativity, purpose and intent; the second is ‘just tools’, implementing that creativity and purpose and intention. It’s absolutely, profoundly wrong. All materials and technologies carry potentialities or virtualities which create new things that were not designed into them. Here the simple example of a Fender Telecaster. No human created these potentialities, they exist within the material object itself. Our technologies have intent. They create. No human programmed or built these things into them. The material world is not passive or inert. Read some quantum theory. It contributes more novelty to our lives than anything humans do - humans mostly just imitate one another. Or as some anthropologists say, we didn’t become human, until we had tools. It was technologies and materials in general that gave us our creativity and novelty, that we (vainly) attribute to our own brains. Without them we just fought each other to the death, in imitative rivalry.