“The machine-human-ecological relationship is being transformed”: Indy Johar on the scale of our transition
Cover illustration for Donna Haraway’s Staying With The Trouble: Making Kin In The Chthulucene
A wide-ranging interview with a friend of A/UK, architect and urban thinker Indy Johar (his many interventions on this site, here). It’s from the Edge & Main/Future Of Good podcast (show link here, and some subscription options on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, or Podbean.)
They’ve provided a transcript of the interview beneath the show, and it’s a great way to launch into the rest:
Edge & Main: It really feels like we’re in the midst of massive transitions: cities, communities, industries, and institutions are all in flux in a multitude of ways. How would you characterize the times we live in?
Indy Johar: I think it’s a really interesting question, because I think we can obviously talk about the transition we’re in from the perspective of the things we see around us: climate breakdown, inequality — all these kinds of symptoms.
I use the word “symptoms” here because I think that climate change is a symptom of a much more structural failure. And I think the challenge for us is that we are defining the transition through addressing the symptoms, not the underlying drivers.
I would argue that we are in a fundamental transition in how we see ourselves in the world and at a precipice or a moment where we actually we have to start to redefine how we see ourselves.
Too often the conversation of what it means to be human has been reduced — and has been reduced in the last 300 to 400 years post-enlightenment — to seeing the human as an individual, an isolated object, an object that can be put on a rocket and fired out into space, that can be isolated from its ecosystem.
Whereas actually what science is increasingly starting to tell us is that humans are perhaps an emergent property of our natural ecosystem.
So, you know, we have 92 percent of the same DNA as mice. The trees around us: without them and their capabilities to produce oxygen and other other instruments around them, we do not survive. Actually we’re quasi-indivisible from the ecosystems around us.
Microbiomes, their impact on our gut, on our intelligence, our capabilities: we are fully intermeshed. Our abilities for our bodies to be trained for antibodies: we’re an enmeshed thing. And us being an emergent property of nature redefines the kind of object nature of how we see the world.
I would say the real transition we’re seeing is this transition from an object-orientated view of the world to actually a relationship of interdependence and recognition of interdependence.
Our thesis of how we’ve constructed the world — whether it’s from the private limited company (which is all about creating a sort of isolatable act) to the notion of property rights (which are again of isolatable value and isolatable tradable value), all the way through to price and how we create global markets — they’ve all been about creating the efficiency of accountable systems and transaction systems, with huge destruction of the interdependence of those goods.
So a tree has been reduced to timber, and its value is defined by timber rather than by the vast ecosystem of services it supports and is in relationship with. This reductive capacity has been fantastic for propelling civilization to one type of complexity.
I think what we are seeing is the end of that worldview, and that end is not like—and I think too often this discourse is written as this—“We got it all wrong.” I’m not even convinced that we got it all wrong.
I would argue that we have been going through a transition, and we had to go through this transition to reach a critical mass, where the interdependencies and the externalities generated by our historic model of seeing everything as objects — these externalities start to feed back to us.
So climate change is just how our soft externalities, which we’ve been discounting, have polluted the system sufficiently for it to now register onto our reality. They’re challenging our way of being in the world.
So I would say, whether it’s climate change or plastics or inequality: these are all about us recognizing our interdependence. The great transition we are on is actually this transition in how we see ourselves, but also how we see ourselves in the world.
The machine-human-ecological relationship is being transformed. And when you look at it from that perspective, I think that’s the first thing we have to recognize.
That’s the transition. It’s not climate. That’s the transition, and from there comes a whole cascade of what I would call deep code transitions, or deep code transformations.
I listed them already. You know, how we account, all the way through to private property, all the way through to the private limited company, our relationship with the future — all these things have to be reimagined in an interdependent world.
It also cascades into language. Our language is increasingly object-orientated. They’re about the definitional: defining us and them. How do we actually pursue a different type of languages, new syntax and new grammar? I think that our ability to build complex arguments.
I think the reason why we are where we are is because we’re using object models of building constructs of arguments. We don’t yet have the ability to build complex, rich arguments at civilization scale.
I think what social media and our infrastructures have done is given us the means to have large conversations, without necessarily the grammar and the syntax and the mechanisms to build complex arguments.
So when we talk about a great transition, I think that is the typology of transition we’re on, whereas I worry that we often focus on the symptoms rather than the depth of the problem and the scale of this transition.
I would also say history teaches us that these transitions have happened before: worldviews have shifted and I think science has taken us to the point where increasingly, the science is less and less refutable.
Now we have to reimagine our institutional infrastructure off the back of that science. Science has been saying this is the last 20 to 30 years; we just haven’t caught up. And the feedback cycles are now forcing us to catch up. That, I think, is the scale of the transition we’re in.