Erik Davis - Secret Earths

Human experience is being taken over by technological processes, but at the same time it is also being re-defined through a process of re-animism.

Re-animism can be defined by moving experience away from human-centrism to a relational experience with non-organic actors and processes.

Nascent populist movements are representative of this re-animism, including indigenous nationalism, the nature of existence of objects etc...

The study of the phenomenon of smart objects feeds into this new definition of existence.

Looking at re-animist technological factors from a human society perspective is different from a robot resembling a human or a rock having a spirit, but revealing the relationships between these can help define the new study of existence.

Animism is the act of attributing spirit to non-human objects, what can be after science has defined the existence of something – adding spirit to objects and fantastical delusions to other humans.

"Modern" society are the naive faithful as they deem others having silly beliefs.

Descartes states that our observation of reality comes from our senses, which ultimately is a projection based on our subjectivism – not unlike animist beliefs.

When you strip away the human sensory perception of an object, what remains are alleged primary qualities - mass, location, (existence in spacetime) - however these essential qualities can be broken down as well -- locations equals maps which are subjective, matter itself is tricky as it ultimately leads to the weirdness of quantum mechanics.

Re-animism today is beyond attributing a special power to objects in that existence consists of relationships of mutual benefit between persons, only some of whom are actually humans. The definition of persons goes beyond what is typically referred to as humans, in that the human perspective of intelligence must be considered. The area between humans and non-humans is a social relationship from this perspective. Culture within the animal realm is the same as ours, Instinct is not a factor. Communication between shamans and the animal world are gestures of society that don't occur on some fantastic spiritual plane.

This idea goes against the status quo of western thinking that naturalises relations around the space of what we call life. By removing life from the environment it we no longer need to have a mutual relationship with it, which allows the commodification of this alleged infinite resource, as opposed to an agent whom we would have dialogue with. However, these non-human persons don't fit neatly into the philosophical concept of "the Other" (mainly due to the necessity in defining The Other with terms used generally with human-centred experience, specifically human language). Again with the philosophical, Martin Buber defined relationships through I-It and I-You. I-You being a mutual experience between any 2 things and not necessarily quantifiable but experience, whereas I-It is a singular experience, a monologue where the singular treats the other thing to be used and experienced. So, the space where this new relationship of re-animism can be found in this interstitial area where the I-It phenomena changes into an I-You encounter.