Hybrid Animism: The Sensing Surfaces Of Planetary Computation

This article proposes to examine animism through the perspective provided by a notion of immanent matter drawn on process philosophy (Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari), and quantum physics (Bohm, Rovelli). It then deploys this perspective to illuminate how planetary computation - the impact of digital media technologies on a planetary scale - is rewiring the cognitive, affective, perceptual capacities of the human. The article puts forward the notion of hybrid animism, as a speculative and imaginative philosophical fiction ('philoso-fiction') to grasp planetary computation as a sensorial pan-affective event, and to account for the hybrid techno-digital ecologies humans already inhabit, characterised by ongoing modulation, sensorial intensification and pervasive distribution of computational matter across a plethora of screens, surfaces and surroundings. The value of this proposition, the article explains, is to eschew dominant techno-deterministic narratives: not only techno-euphoria and techno-dystopia, but also the notion of technology as enchantment, with its in-built mystification. By deploying the philoso-fiction of hybrid animism and the un-mediated intuitive sensorial grasp it fosters, planetary computation can begin to be immediately perceived as the expression of new modes of co-habitation and co-evolution of the human and the nonhuman. Finally, the article brings together the nonhuman mutating surfaces of digital matter with cephalopods' skins to vividly and speculatively illustrate hybrid animism as a thought experiment of sorts.