“Fantasies of life-like machines decouple life from living. It is only from the position of being stuck in the world that we learn to engage with it anew”
“The EMM suggests that what we need is liberation from nature. The manifesto refers to this process of liberation as “decoupling.” So poised against the “people-haters” of radical environmentalism, the EMM avowedly embraces “an optimistic view toward human capacities and the future.””
“For the authors of the EMM, the engine of decoupling will be an embrace of human ingenuity and its capacity to innovate new technologies.”
“problem with the EMM is that it rests on a contradictory view of the relationship between humans and the environment.”
“Presumably, the proposed advances in technology will allow us to leave life—the life of nonhumans—to re-wild on its own. Once our lives are no longer tied to its living, we will have the capacity to freely decide its fate. This is Las Vegas environmentalism, and not just because it is a sexed-up version of environmental politics, packaged for the masses. It is an environmentalism that suggests that we shall overcome the world that we inhabit; that we can raise a city in the desert for our pleasure, in ignorance of the promise of a future ruin; that there can and will be a “good,” even a “great,” Anthropocene. Bruno Latour has compared the promise of the EMM to that of electronic cigarettes: a way to smoke without actually smoking. As Latour has written, the EMM paints a world in which it makes “no difference to be with or without” the forms of life and ecological processes in which we are fully imbricated.”
“But the biggest deceit of the EMM is the claim that it pens a future born of an optimistic posture toward human capacities. Like the image, the future imaginary underlying the EMM depicts more than a social world without ecological degradation. It also describes a technocratic future without conflict, without politics. Indeed, it is without humans altogether. A world given over entirely to machines. Technological fetishism is the name we give to the tendency of technological objects to channel our desire and distract us from the conditions of their making.”
“That Tesla Model S, the hover board promised on the horizon, the iWatch. These stand in for global “goods” that stand as measures of the quality of our lives and the wealth of our social worlds. These things fool us, not with camouflage, but by making invisible the conditions of their making. They divert attention from the social relationships that make them.”
“But rather than decoupling from life and nature, biomimeticists proceed by seeking to appropriate life, to redirect it—by attempting, for example, to copy the antibiotic micro-geometry of sharkskin or the nanostructures that allow gecko feet to adhere to glass. Scientists and engineers collaborate in the field to create innovative technologies that make “nature work for us.””
“In many ways, biomimetic research falls prey to many of the same assumptions held by eco-modernists. Namely, its advocacy is often premised on the notion that knowledge and innovation alone will serve to transform the conditions of our planet; that we might engineer a “good Anthropocene” by changing our technological capacities alone; and that how we come to value inquiry into some organisms (and not others) is irrelevant to how we imagine and build futures.”
“the biomimetic researchers make a markedly different set of claims than those of eco-modernists. They encourage a view that our innovations are not driven by human ingenuity alone, that the diversity of the world around us provides much needed inspiration and direction in the making of our futures”
“bodies are deeply embedded in the world. It suggests that our capacities to learn and change are possible because we are vulnerable to it; that we are caught—perhaps even stuck—in the world; and that it is in that condition of being stuck in the world that we might learn to engage with it anew.”
“Like the cuttlefish, it is in the nature of our bodies to change, alter, even to deceive. We do not create patterns for visual confusion with our skin. But with our hands we transform the conditions of our environment in accordance with our needs and tastes. We engage with other forms of life and technologies to generate new bodily comportments, new ways of being.”